Politics

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.

We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.

And we’ve reached the final day at AoIR 2023, and the session on networks that I’m in starts with Dmitry Kuznetsov, whose interest is in the community practices found in /r/hongkong during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These reacted against the gradual takeover by the People’s Republic of China, and were a transformative time for Hong Kong – but it is important to avoid a feel-good interpretation of these protests.

The final speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session are João Carlos Magalhães and Emilie de Keulenaar, who begins by outlining the recent history of platform content moderation – from the relatively minimalist approach of the 2000s to early 2010s, influenced by a maximalist and very American understanding of free speech and executed mainly through manual means, to the more interventionist moderation since the mid-2010s, recognising the multiple harms of unlimited free speech, building on a more European and international human rights framework, and utilising

The final session on this second full day at AoIR 2023 is on deplatforming, and starts with Richard Rogers and Emilie de Keulenaar. Richard begins by outlining the idea of trace research – using the ‘exhaust’ of the Web to study societal trends unobtrusively, not least also with the help of computational social science methods.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.