The final day at ECREA 2024 begins for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, and a paper by the great Annett Heft. Her focus is on the diffusion dynamics of conspiracy theories across platforms. She begins by noting the substantial growth in conspiracy theory diffusion, and the severe consequences these ideas can have. Cross-platform activity (involving social media, social messaging, multimedia platforms, alternative news media, and mainstream media) can further heighten this impact.
The next session at ECREA 2024 that I’m attending is on communication in times of illiberalism, and starts with Natalie-Anne Hall. Her focus is on political engagement around Brexit on Facebook, in the post-referendum period between 2017 and 2019. Rather than gathering Facebook content, this study focussed on Facebook users – in recognition of the fact that Facebook remains the leading mainstream social network in the UK.
The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Azade Kakavand, whose interest is in mapping far-right voices across platforms. This is methodologically difficult, and requires a matching of user identities across platforms – especially also because far-right actors are well-known for using multiple platforms for a variety of distinct purposes.
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.
The first full day at the ECREA 2024 conference begins for me with a panel on Telegram and politics. The first presenter is Corinna Peil, whose interest is in COVID-19 conspiracy narratives on Telegram. How do the people who disseminate such narratives understand content moderation interventions?
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 at Anchor.fm so you don’t miss further updates.
Up first was my appearance in episode five of Read Them Sideways, where I spoke to Sebastian about the recent closure of Meta’s data access platform CrowdTangle. This is a major blow to public-interest critical scrutiny of what happens on Facebook and Instagram, even though Meta has now launched the broadly similar Meta Content Library as a replacement – but while the MCL certainly looks like it will provide similar data to scholarly researchers who manage to gain access to it, it substantially reduces the range of users of these data (especially excluding journalists and other independent watchdogs, at least for now), and so far seems more difficult to work with than CrowdTangle was. We’ll see how things develop from here…
Just a few days later I also spoke to the well-known Australian technology journalist Stilgherrian, as part of his long-running The 9pm Edict podcast. We had a long, wide-ranging, and very enjoyable discussion about a wide range of topics including the current Australian federal government’s energetic if generally ill-informed actionism on social media policy, the decline of Xitter, the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, and various other current issues – just listen to the whole thing already. Stilgherrian has also compiled a list of further background information on his site, to go with the podcast itself.
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 Meta banning all news content from Facebook in Australia for just over a week after the NMBC was introduced in February 2021, and it took some urgent negotiations and what amounted to a significant backdown by the then government to resolve the situation at least for the time being; but with those temporary solutions now reaching the end of their timeframe the discussion about the NMBC has flared up again. Meanwhile, ill-advised by some of the same people who constructed the NMBC in Australia, Canada passed a very similar law in 2023, and as a result has seen a permanent ban of news content from Canadian Facebook since August 2023 – with all the substantial negative consequences that the absence of news from what remains a very important social media platform was always going to produce.
Recently , I was asked to contribute a brief overview of the NMBC saga in Australia to a public event organised by the United States’ Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), and because of time differences made that contribution in the form of a pre-recorded video statement – the video as well as the full text of that statement are below. Much of this also builds on our QUT Digital Media Research Centre submission to the Australian federal parliament’s current Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, which (amongst an incoherent laundry list of other issues) also addresses the future of the NMBC. I led the development of section two of our submission, which works through the flaws of the NMBC and proposes saner solutions for subsidising quality Australian journalism than the NMBC could ever hope to be. (In fact, I also discuss this in a recent episode of the DMRC’s new podcast series Read Them Sideways.)
But back to the CCIA event: here is the video of my contribution, and the full text of what I had to say. At the bottom of this post, I’ll also embed a recording of the full CCIA discussion.
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