Politics

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

In the 2012 Korean election, conservative Korean agents were busted for using Twitter accounts to influence the election, and a list of such accounts and the agents was subsequently released; this list of 1,008 accounts and their behaviours was used in the present study to identify the typical behavioural patterns of non-bot …

The final speaker in our ICA 2018 panel is Neil Thurman. He notes that beyond the platform studies we must also look at the intersections between different social networks and platforms, and at the broader societal debate about echo chambers and filter bubbles. His work builds on the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Survey (covering 26 countries), and explores how aware and concerned users are of and about the algorithmic and editorial selection of the news content they engage with.

Some 57% of respondents are worried about missing out on challenging viewpoints and important information as a result of such …

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

First, Internet users consult an average of 4.5 different types of media to find information about politics; more than 50% use search engines to check information (very) often, and 80% do it from time to time (how they do so is limited by their search skills, however). There are also some national variations in these patterns …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Elizabeth Dubois, who again highlights the moral panics about the effect of ‘the Internet’ on information flows. But there are many different media and platforms, where users exercise different media use choices. There is a need to better measure media habits, therefore, including their specific diversity, timing, and tactics.

On average, users across the countries surveyed by the Quello Search Project accessed between seven and nine sources for broadly political information (this is per day, I think?). Legacy offline media are still in wide use, alongside search and online news …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Laleah Fernandez, who begins by highlighting the moral panics around echo chambers, filter bubbles, and ‘fake news’. There is limited evidence that these issues are major concerns, but to the extent that these are genuine problems, key users might be useful in addressing these problems, by nudging vulnerable users towards more sensible behaviours.

Who are the vulnerable, however? They include those who are interested in politics but not skilled in search, and this population could be identified from their responses to the Quello Search Project. (The most vulnerable group ranged from …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, whose focus is on the role of algorithms in shaping information flows, and on users’ understandings of the impact of such algorithms. Algorithmic literacy is not yet well researched; it extends beyond digital literacy and is specific to different platforms, too.

The present study examined algorithmic literacy in the U.S. and Germany, to capture user attitudes and practices across very different media and political systems. It captured a range of personal and behavioural variables, and it seems that algorithmic knowledge, amount of use, and search skills strongly affect users’ …

The second day at ICA 2018 starts for me with a panel on the personalisation of search, and the first presenter is Grant Blank. He begins by noting the importance of free-flowing information for society, but of course the media through which such information flows have changed over time, and this has affected media biases. Contemporary media now form a diverse media ecology.

Do online media in their diversity empower citizens to make better-informed decisions, then, or does the personalisation of online media distort the information that citizens encounter? Much of the present discussion is severely undertheorised. There is a …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Nicholas Robinson, who starts by challenging the idea that the relationships between news media and politics operate on a linear basis. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse, and the ‘war on the news media’ now being waged by Donald Trump and other populists, this perception may need to be challenged.

Trump and others are openly hostile towards the media, and this may undermine the political apparatus. One possible reading is that as people perceive greater threats to political performance, their political interest declines; but at a closer look it …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The study downloaded some 1,000 tweets from Trump during the first six months of his presidency, and identified terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘fraud news’ in his tweets. These were contextualised against contemporary media coverage, and the study also explored the online and offline consequences of this rhetoric.

First, Trump …