Streaming Media

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is João Gonçalves, whose interest is in polarisation in the content recommended by YouTube in the Netherlands. This focusses especially on affective polarisation, on labelling of out-groups as extremist, and on a lack of discursive crossover between polarised opponents.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Petro Tolochko, whose focus is on affective polarisation in climate activism visuals. Such content can be highly affective in climate activist communication, spark audience reactions, and spread online to promote the emergence of like-minded or opposing groups. The analysis here might include aspects of structural polarisation (using network analysis) and reactionary polarisation (using communication analysis).

For the next session at ECREA 2024 I am once again in a session on polarisation, and we start with a double-header presentation by Quirin Ryffel and Nayla Fawzi. They begin with an overview of polarisation patterns in German – here, as in many other European countries, there is no simplistic left/right polarisation as there is in the US, but more usually polarisation on specific issues. One of these is environmental policy.

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.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

And the final speaker in this full session at IAMCR 2024 is Dorismilda Flores-Márquez, who shifts our focus to the presidential campaign in Mexico. This was the first time the election was a contest between two women candidates – a major step in the country.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by Queensland state politicians in the lead-up to the October 2024 election. Even in spite of moves to ban TikTok in government departments and at the federal level for security reasons, candidates have been active on TikTok, and have been using it to build an ‘authentic’ personal brand – which requires immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness.

Up next at IAMCR 2024 are Virpi Salojärvi and Teija Waaramaa, whose interest is in the presence of Finnish legacy media on TikTok. Their move to explore this platform is part of a longer trajectory of journalistic transformation with the growing use of digital and social media technologies; this has also meant a greater incorporation of affective elements into journalistic coverage.

It’s an early Monday in Christchurch, which means I must be at IAMCR 2024. I’ll present later in this session, but we begin this session with Linda Kong, whose focus is on the short-video addiction of rural Chinese elders. Young people in China are in fact worried about the substantial increase in the short video watching by elderly Chinese, and there even concerns about short-video addiction.

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.