The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Baoning Gong, whose interest is in the social media activities of the German far right across a range of platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Gettr. This cross-platform focus is important because they all form part of a far-right online ecosystem, but single-platform studies still dominant the research literature. Far-right actors are well-known for moving between platforms if their accounts are banned from any one platform.

Baoning’s work explores the opportunity structures of these three platforms for far-right movements, then: the specific configurations of technological communicative, regulatory, economic, and user …

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this …

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

People using social media data come from a very wide range of disciplines and bring diverse perspectives to the research; in addition to creating quite a bit of confusion, this can also support the creation of new approaches and epistemologies, and will benefit from a pragmatic and even pragmaticist approach to …

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Eckehard Olbrich, whose focus is on the evidence for polarisation in the German Twittersphere. This seeks to evaluate the claims about the role of social media as a driver of polarisation, and to address the negative impacts of such polarisation if such polarisation is indeed present. Polarisation might exist at issue, ideological, or affective levels, and these levels also intersect with each other, of course.

Taking the German Twitter data as a starting point, then, what are the issues that are being discussed, and what evidence for polarisation is …

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

This was true to some degree, and social media did become a discursive engine of our political public sphere – yet the discourse there wasn’t particularly cross-cutting or inclusive …

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

Mainstream media continue to play a key agenda-setting role on social media platforms, but the way this works differs across social media platforms. Carly collected data from several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) around the UNESCO ‘in danger’ recommendation in 2021. The recommendation was eventually ignored by the …