Internet Technologies

The afternoon session at I-POLHYS 2024 starts with Claudia Padovani, who is reflecting on the implications of political polarisation from a gender perspective. In light of persistent gender inequalities, normative perspectives may be valuable, but there is a need for further definitional work here, and there are several international initiatives and bodies that might help to address this.

The next and final keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Noshir Contractor; his focus is on the potentials inherent in computational social science. Communication research has become central to any academic discourse around the world over the past decades, but this also means that we must take on the grand societal challenges of the present day.

And we conclude the COMNEWS 2023 conference with another set of keynotes, starting with a remote presentation by Verica Rupar on journalism, search engines, and the public interest. She begins by noting the considerable transformations driven by digital technologies over the past years, not least in journalism, since the emergence of the World Wide Web itself; this was first seen as providing a greater platform for non-elite participants, with search engines also offering more access to such a more diverse range of voices.

The final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Yohanes Adven Sarbani, whose focus is on the Tular Malar (‘Contagious Reasoning’) project, which provides digital literacy for the elderly in Indonesia. The Indonesian population is aging, and this increases the need for such literacy interventions in order to decrease the digital gap and especially also protect the elderly from falling prey to disinformation.

And the final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Setio Budi H. Hutomo, whose interest is in the digitisation of local television in Indonesia, and its impact on democratic processes. This system was affected by the 2002 broadcasting bill, which introduced private, community, and subscription broadcasting in addition to public service media. This has an impact especially also on local media, including local television.

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the European Union are very broad, for instance, but also remind us that AI is more than natural language processing and machine learning only; there are many elements that intersect in the emerging AI ecosystem, and we might be better served by thinking about ‘hybrid intelligence’ (also involving humans) than pure artificial intelligence at this stage.

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.