Social Media

The next session at AoIR 2023 that I’m in is on conspiracies, and starts with Elisabetta Zurovac, whose focus is on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. These seek to undermine trust in the established science and mainstream media coverage, and this is related to a broader erosion of trust in established knowledge. They encourage people to ‘do their own research’ and are often building also in important ways on visual content.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Adriana Amaral, whose interest is in fan practices surrounding the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Her project examined social media data from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube related to COVID-19 in Brazil, and through this work also identified the strong politicisation of vaccines especially under and by the leadership of Bolsonaro. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on COVID-19 in Brazil (CPI da COVID) also emerged as a key player in these debates.

The early morning session this Friday at AoIR 2023 that I’m in starts with a paper by my QUT DMRC colleague Sebastian Svegaard. He presents a case study of what happens when politicians behave badly – and how their political fan bases respond to this. This connects with a larger body of work which connects fandom and political research, and positions politics as fandom.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Nathalie Schäfer, whose focus is on bots on Instagram. Bots are pervasive there, and some users have banded together to detect fake accounts and highlight automated interactions that are seen as problematic. They do so with ‘bot police’ accounts that ask to be tagged whenever users encounter bots, and also provide advice on how to detect bots and report them to Instagram.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are my QUT colleagues Daniel Whelan-Shamy and Dominique Carlon. Their focus is on playful engagement with and between bots in the Subreddit Simulator. Here it is especially interesting to explore what happens when bots interact with each other without the involvement of humans; the Subreddit Simulator provides this space, and enables an automated engagement between some 250 bots that make post submissions and comments.

The final paper session on this first day at AoIR 2023 starts with Tony Liao and Liz Rodwell, whose interest is in AI chatbots; they begin by introducing the AI chatbot Replika, available as a Web and smartphone app, which is designed to steer users towards romantic and erotic conversations as they engage with it. This enables an examination of how users navigate their potential romantic relationships with the chatbot, and a comparison with the common relationship stages observed for human-to-human relationships.

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Elizabeth Poole, whose interest is in counter-narratives against Islamophobia and their potential for mediated activism. This incorporates a computational analysis of discussions on Twitter related to Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and COVID-19, as well as qualitative and network analysis of these datasets.

Just made it in time to the next session at AoIR 2023, which starts with a paper by Yiran Duan on deleted tweets. The focus here is on deleted tweets in the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag during three key periods (including Black History Month in 2020 and 2021 and a police brutality trial in 2021). Some 37% of these have become unavailable in the last couple of years.