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Internet Technologies

Snurb — Saturday 2 November 2024 21:37

Assessing Partisanship and Polarisation at Various Stages of News Production and Engagement

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AoIR 2024 |

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

CHALLENGES IN ACQUIRING AND ANALYSING NEWS DATA AT SCALE.pptx from tastysiltstone

I …

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Snurb — Saturday 2 November 2024 00:35

The Early History and Persistent Narratives of the Men’s Rights Movement

Politics | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2024 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alexis de Coning, whose focus is on the men’s rights movement. Although a great deal more visible in recent years, it emerged to public visibility already in the 1960s and 1970s; but it is likely that early men’s rights ideas go back much further still. Alexis takes a very broad approach here to what defines the men’s rights movement – overall, it exists at the nexus of gender and labour rights and positions men as having greater social-economic and financial status that is exploited by parasitic women.

This is in …

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Snurb — Saturday 2 November 2024 00:34

The 1980s Prehistory of White Supremacist Websites

Politics | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2024 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Ian Glazman-Schillinger, who focusses in on a particular far-right site, the Liberty Bell BBS. This emerged from the Liberty Bell print magazine, which set up the BBS in the early days of the computer age. It thereby predates by some decades the more recent concerns about the substantial technological innovations made by white supremacist movements in the 2010s.

Such recent studies often do not historicise the much longer digital trajectory of white supremacist activism; much more work needs to be done here. The original Liberty Bell newspapers can actually be …

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Snurb — Friday 1 November 2024 00:29

What’s the Use of GIFs in Journalism?

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2024 |

I got lost along the way and came a little late to the post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which is on crisis communication and has started with Sara Kopelman. Her interest is in the use of photojournalistic GIFs in Israeli news coverage.

She studied some 541 GIFs from such sites, and found a spread between neutral news, leisure news, and – somewhat surprisingly, given the usual uses of GIFs – negative news. Journalists find such GIFs useful for telling a story; it does so visually without needing a caption. Their endless repetition also poses some ethical questions, however …

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Snurb — Thursday 31 October 2024 20:09

The Platformisation of Digital Platforms’ Climate Pledges

Politics | Government | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | AoIR 2024 |

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures. There are also the Carbon Free Energy initiative; Frontier, an initiative of the online payment company Stripe, which provides carbon removal and sequestration credits; and some emerging approaches to make generative AI platforms more carbon-neutral.

Even before the rise of …

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Snurb — Thursday 31 October 2024 04:41

Technological Refusal and the Coming Quantum Internet

Politics | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2024 |

It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?

What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of …

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Snurb — Sunday 15 September 2024 17:57

And Speaking of Social Media...

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | Streaming Media | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

I’ve mentioned some of these already in my previous update, but wanted to collect them together again in a single post too: over the past few weeks I’ve had a burst of podcast engagements on a range of topics relating to social media. Some of these are also in connection with the new podcast series Read Them Sideways that my colleagues Sam Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate FitzGerald in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have now kicked off – and you may want to subscribe to the whole series via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their RSS feed …

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Snurb — Friday 19 July 2024 01:24

How Have Platforms’ Terms of Service Evolved over Time?

Internet Technologies | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

The overall corpus here contains Terms of Use for some 21 platforms, from 1999 to 2024; building this was challenging and required substantial work with the Wayback Machine and …

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Snurb — Wednesday 17 July 2024 23:12

A Moderator Strike on StackExchange over the Acceptance of AI-Generated Content

Produsage Communities | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Damien Renard, whose interest is in the power dynamics between platform operators and user communities. The focus here is on StackExchange, where moderators went on strike in protest against the platform’s May 2023 policy change to allow AI-generated content.

Moderators saw this as breaking an implicit contract between platform operators and moderators; they were worried about the impact on content quality and concerned that this policy change was implemented without consultation with the platform community. This is an example of digital power struggles on platforms, which …

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Snurb — Saturday 22 June 2024 14:16

The Critical Role of Communication and Media Research in Addressing the Emerging Generative AI Paradigm

Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | ICA 2024 |

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is the annual Steve Jones lecture, which this year is presented by my QUT colleague Jean Burgess and is on the impact of the newly emerging generative artificial intelligence technologies. This should not be confused with the substantial hype around artificial general intelligence, a technology which always seems to be just around the corner and has yet to actually eventuate.

Rather, this talk is about the more limited generative AI systems that appear to have invaded all sorts of projects, and seem to be universally indicated now by sparkle (✨) icons and …

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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