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Industrial Journalism

Snurb — Thursday 26 September 2024 03:27

Reviewing the Literature on Social Media Sharing Biases

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | ECREA 2024 |

The next ECREA 2024 session is also on polarisation, and I’m chairing as well as blogging it. We start with Petra de Place Bak, whose interest is in the cognitive preferences that make specific types of online content more salient and shareable. One aspect of this might be sentiment- and emotion-based biases.

Petra’s focus is on social media communication, which has to address the twin challenges of information abundance and attention scarcity; this is affected both by platform algorithms and users’ own cognitive preferences. Negative content biases can play a role especially in the latter, as can biases (both positive …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 September 2024 23:52

Polarisation in Mainstream and Social Media Coverage of German Climate Protests

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | ECREA 2024 |

The post-lunch session on this first day of ECREA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in the case of disruptive climate protests. Such protests, in Germany for instance by the Letzte Generation protest group, tend to attract controversial media coverage, and it may be such coverage rather than the protests themselves that drive polarisation dynamics.

Untangling the various factors influencing such dynamics is difficult, and this project examined both news media coverage and social media debates to determine patterns of both issue and group polarisation, in both the content of communication and the …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 September 2024 18:26

Mainstream and Hyperpartisan News Framing of Telegram as an Alternative Platform

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | ECREA 2024 |

The next speaker in this rapid ECREA 2024 session is Christian Schwieter, whose focus is on the German news coverage of Telegram as a new and challenging social media platform. Telegram has become a hugely contested object in popular discourse; it has marketed itself as a strongly pro-democracy and pro-free speech platform, but is also accused of allowing hate speech and child abuse materials on its channels – notably Telegram founder Pavel Durov was recently arrested in France for this reason.

Telegram has also become a refuge for the deplatforming, and a space for alternative, conspiracist, and far-right groups. The …

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Snurb — Monday 16 September 2024 14:32

Facebook without the News: Link-Sharing Patterns during Meta's Australian and Canadian News Bans (ECREA 2024 / AANZCA 2024)

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | AANZCA 2024 | ECREA 2024 |
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Snurb — Sunday 15 September 2024 18:18

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill (CCIA 2024)

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |
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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 — Thursday 12 September 2024 14:51

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

There’s rather a lot going on in Australian policy-making around social media, most of it thoroughly disconnected from evidence, scholarship, and sanity – and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on some of these developments in future posts, too. For the moment, though, here is an update on some ongoing work surrounding the renewed controversies about Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), a thoroughly misshapen piece of legislation which sought to force major digital media platforms to hand over some of their revenue to cross-subsidise struggling commercial news media operators.

The inherent flaws in this approach led to …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 20:08

Nostalgic Anticipation of the Future of Social Media in the Coverage of Emerging Platforms

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media. In other words, there are plenty of sociotechnical imaginaries about social media at the moment, and perhaps social media are in a midlife crisis, or past their honeymoon phase.

How do …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 01:31

Patterns of Asymmetrical Polarisation in Brazil

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | SM&S 2024 |

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …

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Snurb — Saturday 13 July 2024 13:33

'If you don't know, vote no': Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation in the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum in Australia (IAMCR 2024)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2024 |

IAMCR 2024

‘If you don’t know, vote no’: Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation in the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum in Australia

Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, Samantha Vilkins, Katharina Esau, and Laura Vodden

  • 1 July 2024 – Paper presented at the IAMCR 2024 conference, Christchurch

Presentation Slides

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

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