The next session at ECREA 2018 is one that I have a paper in as well – but we start with Marcel Broersma. He begins by asking whether journalism is truly at home in social media: do its strategies align with user tactics in these platforms, and are the platforms being colonised by news organisations? How are publics for journalism constructed on these platforms, and do users have any interest in being interpellated as publics here?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.

The next iCS Symposium session starts with Fabio Giglietto, presenting his team’s results on the use of social media in the March 2018 Italian election. The project’s aim was to comprehensively examine the role of social media during the election, focussing especially on social media audience engagement with the various media sources available.

The first keynote at the iCS Symposium is by Alice E. Marwick, whose focus is on the motivations for sharing the various forms of content grouped under the problematic moniker of ‘fake news’. Her recent report with Rebecca Lewis on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online has shown that such sharing can be highly effective: because so many of us are now sharing news and news-like information online, and because especially younger users and journalists are paying increasing attention to what is happening on social media, it is now possible for mis- and disinformation content to migrate from far-right, fringe spaces through mainstream social media sites and on to hyperpartisan far-right press sites and even the mainstream news media. One of the vectors for infiltrating the mainstream news in this process tends to be Fox News, unsurprisingly.

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2018 is Christian Strippel, whose focus is on the discourse architecture of German news Websites. The background to this work is a project to develop the tools to automatically detect and mitigate hate speech in comment sections in such sites.

A month ago I was able to present the themes of my latest book Gatewatching and News Curation at the University of Sydney, as part of its Media@Sydney series of talks – my sincere thanks to Francesco Bailo, Gerard Goggin, and everyone else who made this possible. The M@S team also posted video and audio recordings of the talk, which I’m sharing below; in case the presentation is difficult to make out in the video, I’ve also included the slides themselves.

Speaking on the day of Australia’s latest partyroom spill for the Prime Ministership, this was a timely opportunity to reflect on the intersections between journalism, social media, and the public sphere, and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions after the presentation – many thanks to everyone who came along.

More information about the new book is here: Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere.

I am the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session, presenting a paper co-authored with Christian Nuernbergk and Aljosha Karim Schapals, my colleagues in the Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project. Here are our slides:

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.