AoIR 2024

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Laura Iannelli, whose focus is on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Italy was amongst the first countries in the world to implement a mass lockdown, and this became an arena for polarised conflict amongst political elites. The question here is whether this also fostered societal and individual polarisation, and what role mis- and disinformation played in this process.

The next session at the AoIR 2024 conference conference is a session that I co-organised which focusses on controversies, and starts with a presentation by Felipe Soares. His focus is on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, which finally brought the reign of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to an end.

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Gregory Asmolov, who begins by discussing the strange experience of reconnecting with old school friends on social media: do we really want to find out about their political, ideological, societal views? Would we rather disconnect from them again? And if we do so, do we publicly announce that disconnection?

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Yuval Katz. His interest is in the way that the COVID-19 lockdown unfolded in Gaza: even before the current war, Gaza had been under siege for decades, and Gazans have developed many mechanisms for inspirational resilience; this was on display also during the lockdowns.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Kateryna Bystrytska, whose interest is in the use of Telegram channels for constructing knowledge about the war in Ukraine.

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.

The final presenters in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference are Yarden Skop and Anna Schjøtt Hansen; their interests are in the third-party fact-checking network employed by Meta. This operates on the basis of a Meta-provided online dashboard that highlights potentially problematic content, and the dashboard’s operation directs fact-checking away from political content spread by major political figures, and towards other forms of content.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Simran Agarwal, whose interest is in platformisation intermediaries in the Indian news industry. Her interest here is especially in the meso-layer of intermediaries, where AI-driven machine learning tools provide strategic counsel to newsrooms, broker interactions between platforms and publishers with the aim to ‘help’, ‘assist’, or ‘free’ journalists, and appear as certified partners.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, who begins by noting the critical role of data annotation practices in shaping the machine learning process underlying generative AI; such annotation is a world-making practice, must align with editorial values and the journalistic ethos of objectivity, and can of course also reproduce pre-existing societal biases.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nadja Schaetz, whose interest is in AI hype in news coverage. Journalism has often uncritically covered the rise of generative AI, and swallowed the claims of AI companies about the capacities of their tools; this project collaborated with the Associated Press Local AI Initiative and conducted participant observation in local newsrooms to understand journalistic reactions to this initiative. Through the project AP worked with five newsrooms to provide AI-supported technologies.