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AOIR 2021 conference theme “independence” of the internet provides an opportunity for researchers to reevaluate internet development in the global south by applying theories of “informational capitalism” (Castells, 2000; Schiller, 2000) and “surveillance capitalism” (Suboff, 2019). This paper aims to trace the development of informational society in Mongolia, a 30-year-old democracy in the Central Asian steppe. With a nomadic culture, a Buddhist tradition, and a communist past, Mongolia’s information society has unique encounters with global corporations such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM). The paper focuses on juxtapositions of information society with traditional, cultural, political, and social aspects of Mongolian life. I establish how Mongolia is positioned in various global information society perspectives, by investigating tensions that have not been addressed in this nation’s context of a communist past and an ongoing nomadic lifestyle. I also trace the historic development of information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives during the socialist and post-communist eras. Online speech controversies, misinformation, and commercial speech on social media all tested Mongolia’s new Constitution of 1992. The constitution promulgates a free press and the freedom of speech in the zeitgeist of the 1990s to prioritize the eradication of communist-era political censorship and communist party control. One cannot help but notice the gap in the legal frameworks of Mongolian institutions between the current and the “aspired to” states of democratization and protection of human rights and cultural experiences.

The Promises, Problems, and Possibilities for Alt-Networks Introduction Social media has become a central facet of contemporary life and that centralization has narrowed our perspectives and lessened our possibilities (Pariser, 2011; Vaidhyanathan, 2018). This centralizing of social media networks happens for their individual users, but also at the level of how social media informs our discourses through journalistic practice, government institutions, industry sectors. Because of the role that social media now play, we have become acutely aware of their shortcomings. Their platforms not only host but actively cultivate toxic and abusive environments for many of its users. In addition to their functions of interaction, they also provide avenues for increasing governmental control through surveillance or gatekeeping. Given the lack of adequate response from tech companies to these long standing issues, it was inevitable that something had to happen. In response to these conditions, tech advocates, activists, students, and scholars have launched numerous alternatives to mainstream social networks. These networks rethink what social media can and should do in times of over reliance on monolithic digital platforms. Some networks redesign the user’s experience to lessen or eliminate harassment; some networks focus on data privacy responsibilities; some create spaces where non-centralized networks can persist even against oppressive governmental regimes. Given the rise and differentiation of alt-networks, there is a need to study and examine the proliferation of alt-networks. This panel offers four presentations varied in objects, different in methodological approaches, and diverse in their claims. In examining alt-networks, this panel will explore how these redesigned digital platforms respond to demands of scalability, how political activists develop and deploy alt-networks for protests, how researchers could cultivate a games theory approach to studying alt-networks and, finally, how the lack of certain features in alt-networks may doom their survival. The methods being explored will include critical theory, social science research, methodological discussion, and critical analysis through a rhetorical lens. Ultimately, our panel hopes to join in on emerging conversations about the ecology of networks and contribute valuable insights for internet research. A Network of Alt-Networks These papers have been carefully assembled to represent a substantial spectrum of the promises, problems, and possibilities for Alt-Tech today. In the first presentation, the paper develops a games theory approach to studying alt-networks, in this case, Mastodon instances. This is an important development as mainstream social media networks have benefited from years of research approaches, new networked objects create new networked questions requiring new methodological considerations. Related to this problem, the second presentation examines how and when alt-networks engage or resist the inevitable need to scale their operations. Such a study is important because mainstream social media impose a will to scale in ways that make it seem natural and unstoppable. The third presentation engages activists and how ad hoc alt-networks allow for platforms that avoid and leverage themselves against oppressive regimes. Finally, the fourth presentation will explore why alt-networks have so far failed alt-right political actors. This argument will look at how micro-interactions on platforms inform and drive a dangerous cycle of political antagonism. As a set, these presentations will give AoIR attendees a comprehensive survey of sites, methods, and sources for engaging and analyzing alt-networks. While the papers all draw heavily on critical theory and analysis, each differs in how they approach their objects of analysis. Using technical approaches, social science methods, speculative means, and rhetorical analysis the papers also demonstrate a wide swath of ways to encounter the alt-network. Finally, the sourcing and discourse engaged by each presentation activates multiple academic discussions while also sticking close to shared themes and concerns. The Possibilities of Alt-Networks This panel builds on recent work concerning the disappointment with mainstream social networks but also the promise of alternatives (Gehl, 2015, Tufekci, 2017). The adherence to tech industry’s unfair labor practices, the inability to respond to users’ needs, the lack of clear and consistent privacy responsibilities, the weak submission to governmental control— these concerns with social media have all been written (Noble, 2018; Roberts, 2019). The rise and proliferation of Alt-Networks is an important development for internet researchers because those innovations rekindle the earliest aims of the internet itself. Namely, the construction of a system whose topological configurations resisted centralization and allowed for its users to develop multiple ways of communicating knowledge to one another.

Head-Mounted Virtual Reality (VR) is generally discussed as a gaming technology, but in this paper we argue for the greater need to take VR seriously as a general computing platform and future site for, and of, work. For Facebook (who hold a dominant 39% share of the VR market) VR is not simply a gaming device but as a new frontier for social media, framed by Zuckerberg as a “new kind of social computing platform”. In this paper we report on our research that is examining the implications of VR as (1) a technology being introduced into workplaces; as (2) a possible site for existing forms of labour, in technologies like Infinite Office; and as (3) a platform for transformed and new kinds of labour, such as remote work via telepresence. We identify concerning issues of algorithmic discrimination, exascberated by a prevailing 'fantasy of perfect data' with VR, with serious consequences in the context of productivity tracking and analytics, and the further expansion of the gig economy into new domains.

This paper explores how transnational identities are negotiated through digital and social media use, and how the narratives online contribute to Rohingya transnational identity. Recent studies have made significant strides in understanding refugees’ media practices during migration, transnational family ties, settlement in a host society. However, little attention has been paid to more nuanced understanding every day of risks and opportunities of digital media practice in the context of conflict and forced migration. Drawing on a qualitative approach of semi-structured and social media scroll back interviews methods, I investigate the use of technologies in their everyday experiences of prolonged displacement in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, Bangladesh and among resettled refugees in Brisbane, Australia, both distinct but interconnected within a power structure. The findings expose the ‘double-edged’ nature of communication technologies. While most participants think technologies have been a lifeline for their survival, participants from the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp show that security and surveillance are key concerns for members of the Rohingya diaspora. In this paper, I argue that although digital and social media offer a niche of a repertoire of resistance and the rise of a new form of community in a context of statelessness, the use of such technologies can be juxtaposed with the consequence of digital surveillance and victimisation in everyday life in a refugee camp. By focusing on both urban and refugee camp settings, this paper offers critical insights into power inequalities and transnational diaspora activism, authoritarian politics, specifically its mediation by digital technologies.

The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) community is currently one of the largest creative content communities on Pinterest (Hall et al., 2018), a social networking service (SNS) that encourages users to both share information about creative processes and attempt projects in real life (IRL). Pinterest users share ongoing projects by creating Project “Pins”, which consist of images, videos, and text descriptions of creative content. And yet, while several studies have investigated user behavior in relation to everyday ideation and creativity on the site (Linder et al., 2014, Hu et al., 2018, Mull and Lee, 2014), little is known about the characteristics that lead users to prefer some DIY projects over others. Thus, this paper introduces the Pinterest-DIY data set, which consists of text data mined from 500 DIY project Pins on Pinterest. Using a custom sampling approach, we created a taxonomy of DIY characteristics related to each Pin’s project type, function, materials, and complexity. To measure user preferences on the site, we also conducted a sentiment analysis on user comments for each DIY project Pin. This paper introduces the data set and presents two use cases for the internet research community using both exploratory and confirmatory statistical methods. In our view, the Pinterest-DIY data set will provide further opportunities to examine whether, and to what degree, participation in online DIY communities promotes everyday creativity and increases engagement with physical matter.

Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analysis of TikTok, WeChat, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Because of the book-length analyses preceding the panel, we are able to distill what is distinct and recognizable about these platforms – what we call ‘platform specificities’ and demonstrate how these specificities are shaping not only the experiences of the users of those platforms, but the social media ecosystem more broadly. The panel contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding platform power, social media and ways of making sense of social media, painting in board strokes plausible future developments to keep an eye on. The extended abstract holds a panel rationale and five extended abstracts for each analyzed platform.

Across cultures and contexts, digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok/Douyin, WeChat, and Spotify are fundamentally reshaping both the processes and products of cultural production—from music and news to entertainment and advertising. But, despite considerable attention to the perverse power of algorithms in various spheres of social and economic life, we contend that existing political economic frameworks fail to account for the distinctiveness of the cultural industries. Challenging essentialist theories of platform dominance, this paper argues that claims of platform power need to be qualified in the context of industry- and culture-specific inquiries. Building on research in science and technology studies (STS), software studies, political economy, business studies, and media industries studies, the paper presents a new analytical framework to analyse the evolving power relationship between platforms and cultural producers. It is argued that the decision space of cultural producers in their role as platform complementors is shaped by three key variables: 1) platform evolution, 2) cultural industry segments, and 3) stages of production. The proposed framework makes clear that, while the relationship between platforms and cultural producers is staggeringly uneven and, at times, highly volatile, it should be understood as one of mutual dependence. That is, platforms exert mechanisms of power over the phases of the creation, distribution, monetization, and marketing of culture; but they also furnish space for negotiation and contestation. Acknowledging this requires a framework that is less deterministic and sensitive to the nuance inherent in cultural production.

This paper examines the potential role of social media in enhancing the understanding and perception of victims of police killings and the data collection surrounding these incidents. Through a series of content analysis and social media mining exercises, the authors observe the emergence of three distinct types of social media content offered on victims of police killings: persistence of the deceased’s activity across social media, sensational commentary on videos and blog postings, and memorials on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. As part of a larger investigation of the availability and accessibility of official police homicide data, this paper aims to present social media data as a potentially powerful source of information to supplement quantitative reports. This process may be especially useful for the most affected communities, particularly BIPOC communities.

This paper adopts the lens of social media rituals to study a new incarnation of ritualized greetings: good morning memes. These are a popular yet under-studied form of ritualized greeting posted every morning by social media users across the global. Such memes feature text with a wish for the incoming day paired with elements such as flowers, food or animals. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which these memes construct values, broadly defined as guiding beliefs about the desirable. My analysis is based on a sample of 414 good morning memes posted to Instagram in English and Italian. I conducted a content analysis examining the posts for content (protagonist and background), the main values conveyed (e.g. achievement and self-efficacy, happiness and positivity), and their stance (serious or ironic). A preliminary analysis revealed strong consistency in the dataset. Overall, good morning memes embed the general mandate for “politeness” that infuses the communicative genre of greetings, transposing it in the meme format through impersonal messages and a saccharine aesthetic. Furthermore, the memes voice a shared core of values, namely: “Happiness and positivity” and “performative kindness.” However, the English and Italian subsets also diverge in significant ways. The English language version of the meme upholds the value of “achievement and self-efficacy,” possibly because of the influence of American values on globalized social media content. Conversely, the Italian-language version of the meme uses humor to pushback against the idea that the morning is a time to be energetic and productive.

Environmental crisis is one of the main issues on the current social, political and media agenda that has spread to citizens engaging environmental activism in many ways. This paper focuses on the emergence of a very specific type of environmental activism in social media that we named as “eco-influencers”. Drawing on our findings of an ongoing digital ethnography (Pink et al. 2016; Hjorth, Horst, Galloway, Bell, 2017) among Instagram profiles devoted to disseminate contents related to sustainability and climate change, our aim here is to explore some controversial issues regarding how they understand independence in relation to activism, lifestyle, consumption and work. We named these environmental activist eco-influencers as these profiles develop similar strategies as those that, according to Leaver, Hihghfield and Abidin as influencers are characterized by: 1) applying positive self-branding strategies, 2) managing their visibility 3) cultivating their community of followers adopting storytelling techniques consistent with their lifestyles (Leaver, Hihghfield, Abidin, 2020: 106). The fieldwork consists in participant observation in Instagram since July 2020 following the profiles through a collective research account to maintain interaction and expand our field site until we have an intentional sample of 60 profiles that allowed us to create a first typology and beginning in-depth interviews. In this paper we highlight some features that have been raised regarding their activity as activists and the very notion of “eco-influencer”.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked passionate debate worldwide on matters of public health. A portion of this debate has been dedicated to the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. While the majority of health officials agree that wearing a mask is efficacious, there has been a widespread movement against masks. The “anti-mask” movement is often characterized for spreading misinformation about masks and for its overlap with the anti-vaccine movement. This paper focuses on the mask sentiments of the anti-vaccination community prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to identify if the anti-vaccination movement held prior beliefs about masks to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases and if those beliefs differ from their mask sentiment today. Through thematic analysis of 44 Instagram posts prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that online vaccine safety communities have, in the past, regarded mask-wearing as a viable alternative to vaccines. Notably, posts supported the efficacy of mask-wearing while criticizing the mandates to wear masks in healthcare settings. In this paper, we elaborate on these mask narratives, as well as their implications in how the anti-vaccination group had a dramatic shift in mask sentiment during the pandemic.

One of the founding stories of the United States centers on Patrick Henry’s 1775 declaration “give me liberty, or give me death” on the floor of the Second Virginia Convention where war with Britain was being debated (Cohen, 1981). A similar sentiment is part of several national origin stories including the 1320 Declaration of Scottish Independence, which may have been an inspiration for Henry, and Greece’s national motto of “Liberty or Death,” which was the rallying cry in the 1820 Greek War of Independence. In each instance the suggestion is that independence will be achieved either through successful revolution or death. But in our modern networked cultures, what kind of independence can be found in death? This panel takes up the AoIR 2021 Independence theme by considering how our information and communication technologies are entangled with the end of human life, both at individual and community levels. Our case studies focus primarily on the United States and is deeply invested in considering practices that are evolving in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the long epidemic of police killings of people of color in the U.S. In each of these long events, we are witnessing a myriad of efforts to collect mortality data and render it in ways that make sense of scales of loss. But questions about digital afterlives, networked and remixed loss, and proprietary control over digital remains complicates the foundational narratives of liberty through death and enrolls our dead in practices of nation formation even when those very lives were rendered expendable by the nation-state. At the same time, these practices are an important part of the problematic narrative that nothing dies on the internet, where deaths can circulate as undead memes and commodified data streams. The papers on this panel examine the intersection of data management and speculative death (life insurance, mortality tables, pandemic statistics, counting the dead or potential dead) and death care management (personal digital archives, maintenance work, kinship ties, digital estate planning/mortuary rites, memorialization). As interdisciplinary scholars from Library and Information Science, Science and Technology Studies, and media history, we interrogate the historical, sociotechnical, and cultural aspects of sorting and caring for the dead through networked information. How are people, institutions, and infrastructures working to make sense of and account for the dead on both individual and collective scales? In what ways do histories of racialized and gendered surveillance and violence impact the treatment of the dead when it comes to both digital and physical remains? Major digital platforms and tech companies are increasingly at the center of memorialization and mourning practices, both building on and transforming the ways that these longer histories inform mortuary politics. All four papers show how institutions and individuals are using digital media and networked information— from mortality data and barcodes affixed to coffins to social media memorials and crowdfunding platforms—to assess, track, memorialize, and otherwise manage the dead. We pay particularly close attention to the ways that race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and citizenship affect how the dead are counted and remembered. We trace the history of technologies used to assess risk and manage mortality, comparing recent COVID-19 related developments to previous crises or pandemics and to longer histories of deathcare management as data management, including the history of the life insurance industry, mortality tables, and surveillance, from chattel slavery to contemporary predictive policing. In the 21st century the majority of these practices have transitioned to online and networked spaces, even as they continue to create social networks of information and ritual. Despite digital technologies being offered as a “solution” to the problem of death, our disparate case studies show how digital systems tend to reinforce existing structural inequalities, thereby troubling any sense that independence from violent social formations exists even in death. Cohen, Charles (October 1981). "The 'Liberty or Death' Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric". The William and Mary Quarterly. 38 (4): 702–717.

Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discourses, and anxieties similarly characterising Hollywood’s “synthespians” at the turn of the twenty-first century; the legacy of “virtual idols” in East Asia (also known as “Vocaloids” in Japan); and the latter’s recent democratisation by a new generation of “vTubers” across video-sharing sites. Recognising this cross-medium migration of virtual celebrity—from anime, video games and blockbuster cinema to the participatory web—this paper adopts a platform-specific lens to highlight the affordances, cultures and vernaculars of specific social media as essential to virtual influencers’ aspiration to, and attainment and maintenance of, attention and fame.

Despite dominant cultural narratives about platform vitality, whether their immense global penetration or companies’ overwhelming political and economic power, platform history is marked by shutdown and failure. Companies and sites shutter with an understated regularity. As they go, they often delete large swaths of user content, with consequences for the memory practices of both individuals and communities. In turn, this paper examines the ethical approaches that platform employees bring to the process of platform shutdown and user content deletion. This phenomenon is analyzed using 52 interviews with employees from now-shuttered platforms. Drawing on literature on values in technology, technological breakdown and decline, as well as from critical approaches to the study of platforms, this paper articulates the ways that platform employees understand the ethics of social media data deletion, and how these ethics come to shape what remains of these platforms after they close.

This paper provides an overview of the Reading Wars as a site of discursive struggle. Using a Bourdieu (1993) facilitated digital sociology, this paper will present a case study of the 2018 hashtag #PhonicsDebate to illustrate how literacy researchers and cognitive scientists used social media as a space to navigate, negotiate and reimagine the contours of the field of literacy. Using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 Phonics Debate hosted by the Australian Centre for Educational Research and the think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary understanding of the politics online. If policy researchers are to clarify the relationship between politics and their field in the 21st century we must understand how boundaries are negotiated using digital tools and how fields are imagined.

Internet memes are now part of mainstream media culture. On social media, each day memes are created, consumed, and shared by millions of people. Advertising agencies create their own memes to promote brands and products. However, memes are also integral to subcultures on 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr, where most memes originate from. These subcultures battle the mainstreamization of memes to protect the independent media making practice of memeing from outsiders, who they call ‘normies.’ Their weapon of choice are so-called ‘dank memes,’ which are self-reflexive internet memes that criticize mainstream memes and memeing. This critique is a form of visual vernacular criticism, which is highly understudied, especially in regard to digital metapictures such as dank memes. The question this paper wants to answer is: how are dank memes made and employed to reclaim the independent media making practice of memeing from mainstream and marketing culture? The focus lies on specific pictorial practices that counteract the popularization and commercialization of internet memes. To explore these counter-practices, the paper proposes a methodology that combines media philosophy with practice theory to stress that digital metapictures themselves such as dank memes hold knowledge about the media practices that mainstream memes are made of, and about how to counteract them. To explore this media knowledge, examples of the meta-meme $2 are closely examined in the context of the subreddit r/dankmemes. The conducted picture practice analysis suggests that dank memes oppose image macros, while being criticized themselves as mere shibboleths to meme culture.

Drawing on the examples of three current health debates on Twitter revolving around the hashtags #medicalcannabis, #covid19 and #vaccinationervirker (in English: vaccinations work), this paper explores the broader theoretical question how we may expand the notion of ‘health data’ to include health debates and discussions on social media, and further how these can be linked to concepts of digital health data assemblages and communicative others. By combing insights from AI and communication studies and STS, as well as insights into the human-data relationship from digital health studies, the paper theoretically links digital data assemblages with communication theory which provides tools to think about health data as relational and communicative. With this, social media data becomes relevant in a new light, not only for media scientists, but also for understanding health practices in a digital age more generally. The paper discusses issues this theoretical perspective raises for researchers of social media and online health engagement; what challenges and possibilities this provides in relation to studying social media discussions on health; and finally, an overview of analytical strategies and empirical fields from which these perspectives may be studied.

Technological innovation depends on earthly resources. As such, the drive to continuous growth that has propelled technology forward is also in direct competition with a planet that is reaching capacity. This expansion and consumption model has both supported and neglected the data of the dead, which both proliferates and languishes. For example, as researchers across disciplines have noted, the dead may soon outnumber the living on social media. Questions about digital remains should attend not only to social media profiles but also to the life cycles of data. This paper considers environmental and resource-related questions about the traces we leave when we depart. To do this work, a theoretical methodological approach following the Computing within LIMITS model (Nardi et al, 2018) is employed to consider the accumulation of data that remains after users have departed from their earthly (and digital) lives. LIMITS is a sustainability model that asks researchers to (1) question growth, (2) consider models of scarcity, and (3) reduce energy and material consumption. That is, this paper questions the life of digital data that can be maintained and can even grow after a user passes on. In addition to questions about mourning, memorializing, and archiving the dead, the LIMITS model prompts ethical questions about how to bury our dead data responsibly and sustainably in the face of exponential growth.

Burgess and Bruns (2015) have linked the computational turn in social media research to a rise in studies that focus exclusively on ‘easy’ data, such as the ‘low hanging fruit’ provided by Twitter hashtags. This paper set out to explore whether this preponderance of easy data and studies focused on the 2011-12 protests is evident in research between 1995 and 2019 through a systematic review of digital activism literature (N = 1444). A particular focus of the review was the extent to which digital activism research revolved around the use of computational digital methods, case studies based in Europe and North America and data gathered from single online platforms (e.g. Twitter). The review showed that most of these studies focused on social movements, campaigns, activists, and parties based in the United Kingdom and United States, and were conducted by researchers based in universities in these countries. In contrast, there were relatively few articles addressing activism, institutions and platforms in non-Western /Global South contexts with the exception of the Arab Spring in 2011. In terms of methodological approaches, traditional research methods and big data digital methods studies were prevalent. In response to the easy data hypothesis, the study found that Twitter was the most researched platform in the corpus, but that digital methods were not as commonly deployed in these articles as traditional methods. Thus, the paper concludes argues in favor of greater diversity in digital activism research in terms of its methods, participants, and countries of origin.

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. A photo of a dress, and videos set to “Harlem Shake.” The above are recognizable as “viral” phenomena—artifacts of the early twenty-first century whose production and dissemination were facilitated by the internet, proliferating social media platforms, and ubiquitous digital devices. In this paper, I argue that participation in such phenomena (producing, consuming, circulating, or “sharing” them) constitutes a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice: viral musicking, to borrow and adapt Christopher Small’s foundational 1998 coinage. In this paper I analyze instances of viral musicking from the 2000s through the 2010s, tracking viral circulation as heterogeneous, capacious, and contradictory—a dynamic, relational assemblage of both “new” and “old” media and practices. The notion of virus as a metaphor for cultural spread is often credited to computer science and science fiction, with subsequent co-option into marketing and media; such formulations run adjacent to the popularization of "virus" in philosophical models for globalization and pervasive capitalism across the late twentieth century, from Derrida to Baudrillard and Deleuze. In this paper, I seek to braid these lineages with the work of scholars reading cultural contagion through lenses of alterity and difference, situating music as a particularly felicitous vector for viral contagion, exceeding and preceding Internet circulation. Ultimately, I argue that viral musicking activates utopian promises of digital advocates, through the cooperative social operation of “sharing,” even as it resonates through histories and presents of racialization, miscegenation, appropriation, and the realities of porous, breachable borders, cultures, and bodies.

With the growing centrality of the smartphone in everyday life, the news and public information that young people consume is increasingly subject to algorithmic curation. From the apps and websites of legacy news media to news aggregators and social media, more and more spaces through which young people access news are personalized. Yet, while numerous studies explore algorithms’ influence on citizens’ everyday life, few of these have considered how users themselves perceive and deal with news personalization. This paper considers how young news users experience the algorithmic selection of the news they receive via their smartphones, and how and under what circumstances they aim to negotiate these decisions. Combining walk-through methods with in-depth interviews, it explores young people’s perceptions of algorithms affect their practices on personalized news media and how they aim to intervene in news personalization. The paper finds a variety of tactics through which audiences intervene in algorithmic news selection, arguing that these can be seen as expressions of algorithmic literacy. These practices, however, are far from self-evident: overall, even amongst frequent users of personalized media, algorithmic awareness and knowledge are low. Moreover, such literacy varies considerably between platform contexts. This is problematic, as these deficiencies prevent young people from assessing the completeness, accuracy and balance of the news they are exposed to. Thus, the study stresses a need for media educators to pay more attention to how algorithmic curation shapes the news that users encounter, to further empower young people to navigate an increasingly personalized media landscape.

The notion that ‘death is a taboo’ pervades private, public and academic discourses around death, dying and bereavement in contemporary Western societies. The rise of digital media within the last decades further complicates the appreciation of the stance that death is a taboo, given the increased opportunities afforded in social media environments for embracing death, fostering new intimacies with strangers and semi-strangers but also for turning death into a spectacle (Jakobsen, 2016). The study of death-related practices online and the tensions they raise has rapidly been growing in the interdisciplinary field of Death online studies. However, in this field there is a need for developing shared conceptual and analytical frameworks and ensure methodological and theoretical robustness in line with developments in the study of social media communication. There is a need to synthesize insights from death sociology and interdisciplinary death online studies in order to shape an agenda for an integrated study of the offline and the online that can capture continuities and shifts in death-related practices (see also Borgstrom and Ellis, 2017). This panel collects four papers presented by six interdisciplinary scholars from Denmark, Sweden, Israel and the UK. Focusing on the (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement across contexts - online and offline - the papers critically revisit the ‘death is taboo’ thesis by investigating the particular conditions under which death, dying and bereavement are talked about, storied, and made socially visible and the ways in which technology plays a vital part in coping with mortality.

Race and racism are enduring structural forces that have a hand in virtually every aspect of society; the internet and its vast array of platforms, applications, devices, and cultures are well within their grasp (Nakamura and Chow-White, 2013; Brock, 2020). The papers on this panel trouble, question, and reorient notions of how race comes to matter in our contemporary digital landscape. We build on scholarship that explores how content creators make sense of their relationships to audiences, their contested digital labor, and the centrality of identity to their (im)material work (eg: Baym, 2018; Abidin, 2018; Senft, 2008). Indeed, as critical internet researchers interested in “the lively, animated machines of today’s internet”, we argue that an examination of influencers, microcelebrity, and virality that explicitly attends to race and racism is sorely needed. This panel brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary (anthropology, sociology, media and communication, game studies, queer studies, and feminist studies) scholars working in the United States and Australia, who engage in empirical and theoretical research on microcelebrity and influencer cultures. The papers in this panel employ a broad range of methods - including qualitative discourse analysis and digital ethnographic research of YouTubers, OnlyFans creators, TikTok users, and Facebook groups - to offer a multifaceted analysis of how race and racism function across social media platforms and within microcelebrity/influencer cultures. The first paper takes the broadest approach in their digital ethnographic work and attempts to flesh out the workings of race, gender, and political economies of influencers on YouTube. Particularly, Paper 1 analyzes the Pokémon GO phenomenon and the influencers who came to fame through building relationships with their fans, discarding conversations of race and racism, and engaging in unequal, gendered forms of private work. Key to its argument is an examination of how particular social locations of race and gender and the neoliberal project of entrepreneurship affect the clout, visibility, and well-being of Pokémon GO influencers. The next three papers focus explicitly on how race operates within microcelebrity and influencer circles as well as the effects that racism has on influencers across various social media platforms. Indeed, Paper 2 examines how race and racism mediate the experiences of gay porn microcelebrities in order to flesh out the differing, racialized relational work that occurs on OnlyFans and within its attendant social media subcultures. Most crucially, it destabilizes the often unnamed ‘white default’ of porn studies, while accounting for how race, racism, and sexuality shape online microcelebrity. Paper 3 studies the TikTok platform to think about how young influencers navigate race and racism and pose social justice stances on a burgeoning and ephemeral platform. In particular, engagement with American racial and cultural politics are explicitly linked to notions of platformed citizenship norms on TikToK. Finally, Paper 4 introduces the term “platformed race” to interrogate how Asianness is commodified, circulated, and microcelebrified within Subtle Asian Things (SAT), a private Facebook group. The paper interrogates how dominant narratives on SAT tend to leverage diasporic Asianess in the generation and circulation of memes, which in turn provoke socio-political debate and incite culturally relevant discourse amongst its distributed global community. To summarize, our analyses explore the intersections of microcelebrity and influencer economies, cultures, and labor demands by looking at how creators and their audiences experience race and racism across several platforms. Our various approaches contribute different examinations of race and racism to existing literature on the everyday experiences and structural hurdles that microcelebrities and influencers must endure in order to sustain their livelihood in a shifting platform(ed) landscape (eg: Abidin, 2018, Baym, 2018, Duffy, 2017). As internet researchers working with qualitative methods, we can never know in advance what contexts might be most meaningful for our work, and so we remain critical of how we make sense of both our own judgements and those of our participants (Markham and Baym, 2009). References Abidin, C. (2018). Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing. Baym, N. K. (2018). Playing to the crowd: Musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection (Vol. 14). NYU Press. Brock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (Vol. 9). NYU Press. Duffy, B. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Markham, A. N., & Baym, N. K. (Eds.). (2009). Internet inquiry: Conversations about method. Sage Publications. Nakamura, L., & Chow-White, P. (Eds.). (2013). Race after the Internet. Routledge. Senft, T. M. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social networks (Vol. 4). Peter Lang.

In this paper I explore economic and inclusion opportunities for people with disabilities and mental health issues afforded by ‘live streaming’ ‒ the live broadcast of one’s activities over the internet to a globally dispersed audience. In both 2016 and 2017, the leading live streaming platform Twitch.tv broadcast over 500,000 years of video, which were produced by over two million regular broadcasters (‘streamers’), and consumed by an audience of several hundred million viewers. Streamers can profit, up to and including a full-time living ‘wage’ for those at the highest levels. Numerous successful streamers with chronic health issues have discussed the personal and professional benefits streaming brings them. Utilising data from a research project with 100 interviews, alongside approximately 500 hours of ethnographic observation, this paper examines the experiences of live streaming for broadcasters with disabilities, mental health issues, or physical health issues. Firstly, I explore the positive elements of streaming for these broadcasters, focusing on the many conditions represented in this demographic, and the benefits streaming gives for inclusion and community. Secondly, I consider the negative experiences of these streamers, focused on entanglements of health and technology that make their streaming lives potentially more challenging than their colleagues. Thirdly, I focus on the economic opportunities, and the potential for entrepreneurial activity, the platform affords. I conclude the analysis by exploring how these aspects make live streaming a potentially exemplary emancipatory and entrepreneurial space for these individuals, but not one without challenges.

This panel brings together research into the cross-platform relations between radical Web subcultures and how they are constitutive of “hyper-antagonistic” politics in broader Web discourses. The papers share a concern with vernacular practices of “fringe” platforms favoured by an insurgent far-right movement and their relations to more “mainstream” social media. They engage with the concept of “transcoding between milieus” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 322) as a means to empirically describe multiple transversal processes across different strata of the Web in which “one milieu serves as the basis for another” (313). All papers ground their conceptual analysis in data-driven empirical approaches using historical datasets ranging from “mainstream” platforms like YouTube, to more “fringe” spaces like 4chan. The papers furthermore all use 4chan’s far-right /pol/ board as a reference point for a vernacular “hyper-antagonistic” style that emerged out of this period – a style that has often been related to the “alt-right”. Together, the four papers in this panel offer insights into the apparent insurgency of far-right subcultures within broader online discourse in the Anglo-American context over the course of the last half decade. Each does so with a particular focus, ranging from subcultural conflict between Tumblr and 4chan, the transcoding of the “Kekistan” meme between 4chan and YouTube, the emergence of far-right vernacular in the comments of Breitbart News, and the robustness of hyper-antagonistic discourse after deplatforming measures.

This panel presents ongoing research into online “live streaming” platforms, which offer the live broadcast of individuals’ activities - primarily but not exclusively digital gameplay - over the internet to potentially massive worldwide audiences. The largest platform in this area (on which we focus) is Twitch.tv, already the 30th most-viewed website in the world, with comparable platforms boasting large viewing numbers in China, Korea, and Japan. Our first talk examines Twitch as the dominant leading live streaming platform, outlining its evolution and historical origins while unpacking some of the fundamental user-platform relationships manifested on the site. The second addresses itself to the sociality of live streaming, which unlike traditional video media formats enables a rapid live exchange of comments and conversation between live streaming producers and consumers. The third paper presents an overview and typology of monetization methods in live streaming, focusing in particular on the gamified and “gamblified” elements of making money through the practice, as well as how these practices have evolved through a three-way dialogue between viewers, “streamers”, and platforms. The fourth paper builds on this by examining the on-platform currency of Twitch, known as “Bits”, and how the platform captured donations from viewers through the implementation of this currency system. The fifth and final paper will then further develop these critical enquiries into monetization methods and platform dynamics by presenting a number of extremely contemporary developments in this area on Twitch, exploring new the routes for capital flow enabled by new platform infrastructures and technological systems.

Facebook groups represent an important resource for donor-conceived people to access information, seek advice and share their experiences with their peers. Limited research has considered how donor-conceived people create supportive relationships with peers through social media or how this form of social support contributes to donor-conceived people’s health and wellbeing. This work in progress outlines the ‘search-for method’, a practical user-led tool for discussing instances of participation in Facebook groups. The ‘search-for method’ involves inviting participants to search for their name in the search bar of a Facebook group, thereby retrieving data of all instances they have posted in the group. This paper reports on initial findings from applying the ‘search-for method’ to semi-structured interviews with administrators and members (N=30) of Facebook groups for donor-conceived people from across Australia. The ‘search-for method’ enabled the participant and researcher, as co-analysts, to track and examine specific instances of participation and interaction in the group. By scrolling through content on their own device, participants could decide how to frame their stories of support and whether to disclose sensitive information or omit experiences they did not wish to discuss. Broadly, this approach illuminated how individual and collective donor-conceived identities emerged and evolved with and through online group platforms. In doing so, it provided a framework for understanding sociality between donor-conceived peers longitudinally. This paper contributes to understandings of how digital affinities and peer intimacies develop in Facebook groups over time.

Reddit.com is a social media site with huge volumes and varieties of content, both hosted on their platform, and imported from other providers. It is also a place of counterpublic community action. Sub-Reddits like r/the_donald, and r/theredpill expound, in turn, alt-right and anti-feminist views. Along with various posts, links, and outside content, the communities support millions of words of user discussion. These communities are policed, at least in part, by their exposure to the community at large, and push-back from other people and groups to their content. When a community sees that its action on a site like Reddit is limited, and perceives that its ideas and ideologies are being silenced, what happens? This paper uses data from a digital ethnography of r/TheRedPill, a sub-community of Reddit dedicated to “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” The community was quarantined by Reddit in September of 2018, and since that time has engaged in regular discussion about the movement of community discussion and forums away from Reddit to their own hosting site www.trp.red. Beyond simply allowing versus limiting speech, the case of r/TheRedPill provides an opportunity to engage in a discussion about whether progressive sanction is the right way to manage the intersection of counterpublic views with the needs of tech firms. This paper hopes to further that discussion using a community that is less generally associated with hate speech, and can therefore exist on the margins of acceptability.

This paper takes up the question of how “platform” can be understood when it comes to studies of digital discourse. I posit that this is an empirical and ethnographic question, rather than a purely theoretical one. Regardless of how scholars theorize social media platforms and other technologies, the people interacting with those technologies already have their own emic conceptualizations of what that technology is and how it functions and those understandings shape their social media experiences. This paper aims to explore the stakes of such local conceptualizations. I argue that many of tumblr.com's most active users conceptualize the social media platform as a living actor — a dynamic and agentive entity $2 whom these young people interact, rather than a space $2 which they interact or a medium $2 which they interact. Attending to this particular understanding of Tumblr-as-actor is crucial because it has so intimately shaped the processes by which my research participants have come to take up new political-ethical commitments and identities through their engagement with the platform. However, I suggest that new methodological approaches for the study of digital discourse are required if scholars are to truly take seriously an understanding of platform as agentive figure. To this end, I argue for the use of audio-visual screen capture technologies that concurrently record the content on a screen alongside the bodies of users themselves for analyzing in-the-moment interactions between user and platform.

In our work we study practical approaches to internet research ethics with a logitudinal perspective. We have interviewed more than 40 social media researchers in 2013-2014 using a semi-structured qualitative interview approach. From these interviews we gained insights into the challenges of everyday research practices at the various stages of the research process, as well as into motivations for specific approaches and critical reflections on research design and decision making, particularly concerning research ethics. At the end of 2019 we started re-interviewing the participants in our study and will continue to do so over the next months. In addition to questions about the details of everyday data work and the rationales behind (ethical) decision making, we are asking participants what has changed in the way they conduct research with social media. Based on our interviews as well as the ongoing discussions of Internet Research Ethics in the community, this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of social media research practices and how they have evolved over the past years. Between our two interview periods, the social media landscape has witnessed several changes, including incidents like the "Cambridge Analytica scandal", which have also created ethical discussions in the broader public. By asking researchers about their everyday work, our research contributes to a look behind the scenes of "life as an internet researcher", as phrased in the list of topics in the call for papers.

The digital mediation of visual content depicting death and martyrdom as a trope of resistance and contestation is increasingly employed within social media platforms by transnational activist cultures and popular social movements. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘digital martyrdom’. The emergence of digital martyrdom, and its memetic circulation within visual social media platforms, points to the materialisation of a new, affective and ritualised protest dynamic. Through which posthumous visuals become diffused, reappropriated and politicised within global publics. This raises new ethical implications and moral dilemmas for digital and visual social media researchers, and requires more reflexive and critical thought beyond established ethical considerations. Necessarily, this paper raises ethical questions and provocations for digital and visual social media researchers in relation to the design, collection, presentation and publishing of academic work in the context of death and posthumous imagery online. The questions presented in this paper have emerged out of a systematic study of this phenomenon, with a particular focus on case studies drawn from the Middle East, the United States and Europe. This paper argues that digital and visual social media research in this field merits specific ethical considerations and amplified scholarly deliberation. This is of particular importance for visual social media research that extends beyond a Western context and considers the cross-cultural, transnational dimensions of digital activism.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the concept of ad hoc issue publics, through a mixed-methods analysis of a year of debate over a contentious topic in the Australian public sphere. Following two controversial racial discrimination cases in 2016, a number of Australian conservative politicians called for amendments to a specific section of the Racial Discrimination Act (Section 18C), which they claimed restricted freedom of speech. Similar proposals had been put forward and shelved in 2013. The issue was discussed widely on Twitter and other social media platforms. Eventually, the Australian Senate voted down changes to section 18C. Using a range of network analyses, examining the various network structures created by Twitter’s affordances, this study identifies the publics and communities involved in the debate. The discourses of these communities are then qualitatively analysed. The findings show that different—and sometimes antagonistic—discourse communities are involved in the debate, and while all of these use the same hashtags and keywords, they have contrasting discursive positions. This paper argues that in this case, the publics created as a result of the affordances of Twitter cannot be regarded as ad hoc issue publics, since the discourse communities involved were formed as a result of a priori ideological affinities. Broadly, the findings of this study help in the theorisation of online publics and communities, particularly the necessary elements involved in the formation of ad hoc issue publics and/or online discourse communities.

In today's hyperconnected world, states are confronted with the global challenge of responding to potentially disruptive online communications, such as terrorist propaganda and fake news. Formulating effective internet regulation to address these threats carries the risk of infringing upon media freedom and constitutional rights. In the case of Russia, ostensibly sound legitimations have been instrumentalised to bring about a dramatic decline in internet freedom. Controlling public opinion may well be decisive for Russia's "success" in expanding its system of internet controls without arousing popular resistance. Scholarship thus far, however, has neglected to critically examine how the Russian government legitimates and cultivates popular support for restricting online freedom of speech. This paper aims to address this crucial aspect of internet censorship by studying how restrictions of internet freedom, freedom of expression and the right to information and privacy are framed in political and media discourses. The paper presents a case study examining the legitimation of user data storage, surveillance and restriction of online anonymity, on the example of messaging application Telegram. To justify legal measures in these domains, policymakers have framed their proposals as anti-terrorist, or claimed the need to protect personal data from foreign states. Typically, anonymity and privacy are recast as secrecy indicating criminal (e.g., drug dealers) or morally derogatory intent (e.g., paedophilia). The paper analyses how frames are produced by policymakers; how they are translated and disseminated in state and (semi-)independent media; and how they resonate in online debates and social media.

This paper presents early stage findings from a research project that explores whether the provision of data access addresses concerns that have emerged with regards to data collection by private and public actors. Using the recent right to data access secured by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a point of departure, I examine Facebook and Twitter’s response to these regulations through the lens of their data access policies and processes. I analyse what sort of data is made available and assess what benefit the public gains from having access to their social media data. I then offer a conceptual intervention through a comparative analysis of the divergent approaches two jurisdictions take to data access. I compare the GDPR with an ongoing debate around the introduction of a consumer data access right into Australian law and analyse how these divergent legal traditions and public discourses alter the conceptualisation and enacting of the data access right (and digital rights more generally). This paper provides a timely examination of a right that has emerged in response to the increased datafication of society. As well as offering a detailed analysis of how social media platforms have responded to the data access provisions within the GDPR, the comparative analysis of the EU and Australia shows that significantly different legal foundations can animate this right, ultimately presenting two starkly different visions of internet users as either consumers or citizens.

Online drug markets taking advantage of social media and encryption software (e.g. Tor network) and cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin, Monero) to conceal the identity and physical location of their users are a relatively new area of internet research. Yet, a range of socio-technical innovations have contributed to the proliferation of drug markets on the Internet. Due to the illegality of drugs and drug dealing are anonymizing technologies regarded as important socio-technical practices among its participants allowing to mitigate risks of vendors and customers when exchanging drugs. This panel draws together a number of leading scholars in this emerging area of research to explore questions and issues associated with online platforms enabling illicit transactions. The collection of papers in this panel contribute empirical data and theoretical insight on a range of relevant topics in the study of online drug markets, including methodological challenges, social embeddedness, trust production and governance on cryptomarkets. Various papers in this panel propose new concepts for understanding cryptomarkets as social phenomena where relationships enable economic transactions. It also pluralizes trust building on online platforms and, expanding it from merely institution-based mechanisms to include social relations such as interpreting signs and signals or previous interactions between buyers and sellers. They also expand on reliability of data gathered via anonymous online interviews, drawing attention to participation of marginalized communities. The aim of this panel is to bring together new research to further our understanding of the overall impact of online platform emergence upon global drug markets and to better model their impact on drug dealing, online networks and society in general.

According to dominant theorizations of contemporary society, many people’s daily practices now occur within, and reproduce, a social world where media are the fundamental reference and resource for the development of the self (Couldry and Hepp 2017:15). Although previous research has revealed the mutual shaping of technologies, interaction, and identity in the broader contexts of economic and social change related to ‘millennials’, we know little about the precise ways in which these practices occur and how the self is being differently constructed over time. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, this work in progress paper explores three key questions: 1) What happens when visuality becomes a part of youth’s everyday practices of interaction? 2) What roles are images playing in routine interaction among youth? 3) How and in what ways does the maintenance of a visually ‘mediated presence’ in social media shape youths’ views of the self? This paper elaborates on findings within three categories that illustrate youth’s visual practices and how they are differently understood over time: (1) images of the self in the moment; (2) images of the self over time; and (3) images of the self under surveillance. The preliminary findings of this research suggest that although youth’s technological practices may not all be new, there are significant aspects of visuality that alters some of the key factors shaping young people’s use and understandings of new media technologies.

This paper examines emerging news forms and journalistic practices within Australia that are native to social media. It argues that these shared forms and practices constitute a new genre of ‘social news’. Social news embodies specific kinds of platform vernaculars and pop-cultural sensibilities, and challenges journalistic norms of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ by consistently adopting an overtly positioned perspective. Three Australian-based outlets are studied through this conceptual lens: BuzzFeedOz News, Junkee Media, and Pedestrian.tv. Using digital tools alongside manual methods, this paper investigates the role and significance of these outlets on Twitter and Facebook during the August-November 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. The survey was commissioned by the incumbent conservative Liberal-National Australian government to gauge nationwide support for same-sex marriage. During the survey, social news outlets played an advocacy and activist role. These outlets refrained from publishing provocative ‘No’ op-eds, and Junkee Media and Pedestrian.tv actively encouraged readers to enrol and vote ‘Yes’. Preliminary findings indicate that social news outlets were moderately-to-highly visible on Twitter during the postal survey period. On Facebook, advocacy posts received low-to-moderate levels of engagement. These findings indicate a shifting but not yet transformed Australian news ecology. In addition, social news’ eschewing of ‘balance’ indicates a challenge from emerging outlets to traditional journalistic norms in Australia. Significantly, in this case the challenge comes from outlets that intelligently critique the value in publishing both sides. Overall, this research highlights that disruptions from social media platforms and cultures can be sources of positive potential for news and journalistic practice.

As access to news is increasingly mediated through social media platforms, there are rising concerns for citizens’ ability to evaluate online information and detect potentially misleading items. While many studies have reported on how people assess the credibility of information, there are few reports on processes related to evaluating information online and people’s decision to trust and share the information with others. This paper reports on the first part of a three-phase study which aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of citizens’ practices and needs in assessing the credibility of information shared online and co-create solutions to address this problem. Data were collected from three European countries, through a survey on misinformation perceptions, focus groups, follow-up individual interviews, and co-creation activities with three stakeholder groups. The data were analyzed qualitatively, using, primarily, a grounded theory approach. Results from the citizens’ stakeholder group indicate that personal biases, emotions, time constraints, and lack of supporting technologies impacts the credibility assessment of online news. Study participants also discussed the need for increased media literacy actions, especially in youth. Based on preliminary findings we argue that we need a diversified approach to support citizens’ resilience against the spread of misinformation.

In the age of continuous data collection and algorithmic predictions, children’s privacy seems threatened by the variety of surveillance and data practices in which parents, institutions, corporations and children themselves engage. The vast amount of data routinely collected about children as they grow up include data shared online, whether by children themselves (social media updates, web searches and browsing, data traces of their internet and smartphone use) or their parents (sharenting practices); data shared in the home, like conversations and environmental data captured by internet-connected devices such as smart speakers and internet connected toys; data shared outside the home, including educational and school apps, biometric data in schools and/or airports and stations, health data and medical records, geo-location apps or wearables, etc. Data can be knowingly shared with others, or “given off” as traces of online activities, and even inferred by algorithms that profile, classify and predict users’ behaviour. This panel on the datafication of childhood draws together a number of leading scholars in this area of research to explore questions and issues associated with children’s privacy online as both a protective and enabling right. The collection of papers in this panel contribute empirical data and theoretical insight on a range of relevant topics in the study of the datafication of childhood from the perspective of both children and parents. Based on qualitative and quantitative methods, the individual contributions to the panel illuminate the situated nature of data practices, their embeddedness in diverse contexts and practices of meaning-making through which children and parents negotiate online privacy.

In this paper the medieval period is used as a prism to analyze and contextualize the intersection of mutual surveillance, corporate capitalism and information control. It is claimed that the interplay between big tech companies, nation states’ battle for control and citizens’ participatory surveillance, for instance exercised through social media, resembles medieval principles of feudalism and tight social control. As such, this is basically a paper discussing power related to the Internet, as it turns 50 years. The main argument is that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the dominance of Internet technologies share the same logics of control, surveillance and power as the feudalism that dominated medieval society. The states and big corporations both compete and cooperate, just like the states and the church in Middle Ages.

Social media are in the midst of an emphatic visual turn (Highfield & Leaver 2016), characterised by the convergence of everyday visual expression with professional creative practice and advertising. The advertising-driven business models of social media platforms increasingly depend on automation. Platforms’ use of machine vision is a key frontier in the algorithmic classification of culture. Machine vision algorithms automatically classify and misclassify faces, expressions, objects, and brand logos in the images users create and share. Images shared by platform users form vast databases used to train these same algorithms. Despite widespread use by social platforms, machine vision is poorly understood and accounted for in the study of everyday visual cultures. In this paper we detail a critical response to the use of automation in visual social media, called critical simulation. We outline a critical simulation framework, the ‘Image Machine’, focussed firstly on Instagram. The Image Machine comprises an Instagram data harvester, and open-access machine vision toolbox that allows digital humanities researchers to interrogate the inner workings of these algorithms and analyse their visual (mis)classifications. In this paper we showcase results from the Image Machine applied to images emanating from a major Australian music festival, Splendour in the Grass. This case examines not only how machine vision classifies and operates on culture, but also how these techniques are being operationalised within the advertising model and promotional culture of platforms like Instagram. We argue that the commercial application of machine vision is interdependent with the participatory culture of platforms like Instagram.

This paper reviews the evolution of Chinese academic social media in the past twenty years or so, with an analytical focus of trust and openness. It examines and compares the communicative models in scientific blog, Weibo and WeChat, and explores how academic social media co-evolve with academics’ changing demands, as well as broad social and institutional contexts in China. This research employs multiple methods and combines data collected at different periods of time including 20 interviews, participatory observation of about 200 social media accounts, and document/discourse analysis. This research identifies transformative changes of Chinese academic social media practices, particularly the shifting focus from open sharing of knowledge in public sphere to semi-closed and semi-public grouping based on acquaintance networking. While Chinese academics believe acquaintance grouping enables more reliable and rewarding communications, this raises issues regarding a “closed” and “exclusive” approach to building trust in scholarly/scientific communications. Potts, et al. (2017) theorize “knowledge club” as an entity where members form self-constituted groups, endeavoring to create new knowledge, and balancing the positive externalities of commons against the negative externalities of crowding is key. This paper understands the evolution of Chinese academic social media as a process of “clubization” of digital knowledge systems and further discusses the reasons and impact in the Chinese contexts.

A considerable amount of personal data is now collected on and by individuals: footsteps on Fitbits, screen time in Apple’s iOS, conversations on dating apps, sleeping patterns in baby tracker apps, and viewing habits on Netflix and YouTube. What value do these data have, for individuals but also for corporations, governments, and researchers? When these data are provided back to users, how do people make sense of it? What ‘truth claims’ do quantified personal data make? How do we navigate anxieties around datafied selves, and in what ways are bodies rendered visible or invisible through processes of datafication in digital society? In this panel we explore these questions through four papers centered on the notion of the “data-selfie.” Data-selfies take different forms, including but not limited to:- Visuals that reference the “status” or “progress” of a user’s physical body, as in 3-D scans, or charts generated by self-monitoring apps for health and fitness.- Visuals that reference the remapping of photographic self-expression to biometric, corporate and state surveillance, such as airport facial recognition check points that ask flyers to pose for a selfie, or sex offender databases that now contain images first posted to hook up apps by consenting teenagers.- Representations of the embodied or commoditized self, produced not as stand-alone expression, but as conversational prompts that encourage qualitative, “story-driven” data, in the interests of pedagogy, therapy, activism, etc.- Profiles that reference users as “targets” whose chief value is the metadata they generate. Using proprietary algorithms, platforms mine this metadata—which can include information about a users’ device, physical location, and their activities online—categorizing it for internal use, and selling it to third parties interested in influencing the consumer, social and/or political preferences of the “targets” in question. In Paper 1, Authors 1, 2, and 3 develop a new conceptualisation for understanding how individuals reveal themselves through their own quantified personal data. They call this the ‘confessional data selfie’. Drawing on a sample of 59 examples from the top posts in subreddit r/DataIsBeautiful, they argue that the confessional data selfie represents an aspect of one’s self, through visualisations of personal data, inviting analysis, eliciting responses and personal story-telling, and opening one’s life up to others. In Paper 2, Authors 4, 5, and 6 take a political economy of communication approach to analyse the data markets of dating apps. They consider three cases: Grindr, Match Group (parent company of Tinder), and Bumble. Drawing on trade press reportage, financial reports, and other materials associated with the apps and publishers in question, they point to the increased global concentration in ownership of dating app services and raise questions about the ways in which dating apps are now in the ‘data business’, using personal data to profile users and monetise private interactions. In Paper 3, Author 7 reports on experiences of ‘data anxiety’ among older people in Australia. Author 7 draws on data literacy workshops, home-based interviews and focus groups with older internet users, that led to discussions of control over personal data, control over social interactions, and the resulting implications for exposure, openness, and visibility. Also key to this study was the taking and sharing of selfies in a closed Facebook group, serving as the starting point for reflections on these various experiences of control. Many of these older participants questioned whether or not ongoing participation in social media and broader data structures were ‘worthwhile’. This raises broader questions about the extent to which users are willing to sacrifice control over personal data - or the feeling of control - in order to participate and be visible. Finally, in Paper 4, Author 8 asks: when is the face data? Moving from examples of ‘deepfake’ video exhibitions to Google Art as a repository of ‘face-data’ as cultural and social capital, Author 8 goes on to examine how notions of face-as-data apply to individuals living with the neurological condition of autism. Can facial recognition apps help people with autism to read and decode human expressions? Taken together, these four papers each engage with questions about the relationship between personal data and broader structures of power and representation: from corporations like Grindr and Tinder using dating app data to profile users, to Google using uploaded selfies to train facial recognition algorithms; through to re-purposing and narrativising personal data as part of practices of self-representation; and the feelings of anxiety, unease or creepiness that accompany the increased datafication of personal identity. Self-representation is also a key recurrent thread in these papers, from confessional data selfies as acts of revelation through personal quantified data, through to the photographic selfie as a research exercise that prompts discussions of control and data privacy.

Techniques designed to manipulate public opinion and undermine information ecosystems are rapidly evolving while research lags behind technological innovation and strategic expertise. As a more sophisticated generation of information operations is fast to mature, the papers in this panel shed light on some of the blind spots of scholarly inquiry making visible new thematic strategies, technical infrastructures and both political and economic incentives. The first two papers examine the progression from general political propaganda geared towards influencing elections to highly issue-specific micro-propaganda. The first paper presents an analysis of anti-Semitic disinformation campaigns and harassment during the 2018 US midterms on Twitter and offers rich evidence from interviews with Jewish American opinion leaders about their impact. Drawing on data from Twitter’s Election Integrity Initiative, the second paper examines the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations and how hostile state actors frame and discuss gender identity & politics. The third paper presents an analysis of search engine optimization strategies that extremist YouTubers use in an attempt to game the algorithm and increase their visibility in the network. The fourth paper investigates the relationship between partisan bias associated with Google Search results and the success of political candidates associated with the search queries during elections and finds that partisan search media is a predictor for election outcomes. The fifth paper examines the emergence of a global political economy for manipulation and offers a grounded typology of the vendors, marketplaces, services, and products that are designed to turn a profit from swaying public opinion.

This paper addresses the theme of this year’s conference by focusing on the issue of trust in the uneasy relationship between content-generating users and commercially owned platforms. In this paper, I will present a case study of the use of so-called ‘bookshelves’ on Goodreads which offers a distinct example illustrating how a social media platform will often tests its users’ trust as it seeks ways to capitalize on its users’ engagement and contributions while still preserving the atmosphere of a social network built for and with its users. Bookshelves constitute a key element in making Goodreads a space users can feel ‘at home’ in. In the paper, I show how this becomes clear when considering users responses’ to Goodreads policies on bookshelves. I focus specifically on three different examples of negotiations of trust that have emerged in relation to the platform’s policies on bookshelves. The study draws particularly on discourse analysis with a focus on narrative and organizational metaphors, and the aim is to identify central points of ambivalence in users’ attempts to balance their trust in the platform.

The study of death online has often intersected with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the afterlives of memorial materials. Papers in this panel attend to the growing significance of the afterlives of digital data, the circulation of fake deaths, the care attached to memorial bots, and the intersection of robots and funerals. Over the last twenty years the study of death online developed into a diverse field of enquiry. Early literature addressed the emergence of webpages created as online memorials and focused on their function to commemorate individuals by extending memorial artefacts from physical to digital spaces for the bereaved to gather (De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000; Veale, 2004). The emergence of platforms for social networking in the mid-2000s broadened the scope of research to include increasingly knotted questions around the ethics, politics and economics of death online. Scholars began investigating issues like the performance of public mourning, our obligations to and management of the digital remains of the deceased, the affordances of platforms for sharing or trolling the dead, the extraction of value from the data of the deceased, and the ontology of entities that digitally persist (e.g. Brubaker and Callison-Burch, 2016; Gibbs et al., 2015; Karppi, 2013; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Phillips, 2011; Stokes, 2012). Scaffolding this scholarship are a number of research networks, including the Death Online Research Network and the DeathTech Research Network, who encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media, including supporting this AoIR panel. This panel contributes to the growing field of research on death and digital media, and in particular poses challenges to focus on the commemoration of humans to encompass broader issues around the data and materiality of digital death. Digital residues of the deceased persist within and circulate through online spaces, enrolling users into new configurations of posthumous dependence on platforms, whilst at the same time digital afterlives now intersect with new technologies to create emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots that extend beyond the human, demanding to be considered within the sphere of digital memorialisation. Questions of trust emerge in this panel through various kinds of relationality formed with and through digital remains. These extend from relations of trust in the digital legacies now archived within platform architectures and how we might curate conversations differently around our personal data; to the breaking of trust in the internet when creating or sharing a hoax death; to the trust involved in making and caring for a posthumous bot; to the trust granted to robots to perform funerary rites. It is anticipated that this panel will not only appeal to scholars interested in the area of death and digital media, but also engage with broader scholarly communities in which questions of death now arise in larger debates around data, materiality, and governance on and of the internet. References Brubaker, J. R. and Callison-Burch, V. (2016) Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook. Paper presented at CHI Workshop on Human Factors in Computer Systems, San Jose California. de Vries, B. and Rutherford, J. (2004) Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 5-26. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., and Carter, M. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular. Information Communication and Society, 18(3): 255-268. Karppi, T. (2013) Death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead Facebook users. Culture Machine, 14, 1-20. Marwick, A. and Ellison, N. (2012) “There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!” Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56(3), 378–400. Phillips, W. (2011) LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. First Monday 16(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org Roberts, P. (2004) The Living and the Dead: Community in the Virtual Cemetery. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 57-76. Stokes, P. (2012) Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy and Technology, 25(3), 363-379. Veale, K. (2004) Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead. The Fibreculture Journal, 3. Retrieved from http://three.fibreculturejournal.org

This paper draws on a digital ethnography conducted via Twitter, of a controversial subnetwork of fans of boyband One Direction known as “Larries”. The Larry fandom is built around imagining a romantic relationship exists between One Direction band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, referred to by the portmanteau “Larry”. Imagining relationships between celebrities is a controversial practice known in fan communities as “Real Person Slash” (RPS). For this practice Larries have been framed within popular media as conspiracy theorists. Our study sought to examine whether a more complex and nuanced understanding of the fandom was possible, particularly regarding relationships and community building in this fandom. Through digital ethnographic methods, we explored how the practices of Larries create a space in which new and unexpected desires, identities, intimacies and relations are constituted. Between March and July 2018, we followed approximately 490 public accounts, kept a fieldnote diary, and conducted semi-structured interviews with seven active users via direct messenger. Conducting observations on a daily basis over an extended period as regular fans would, we became privy to the highs, lows, excitement, and tensions of the group, that may be otherwise obscured. This study raises questions about what might be missed in studying controversial groups at a macro level only. This paper considers the benefits of undertaking qualitative digital ethnographic work and discuss the affective flows of digital networks on social media that might remain obscured by other digital methods.

A third of the world’s population is active on social media and a growing number is sharing ephemeral content on such platforms. Though originally pioneered by Snapchat, Instagram has come to dominate the ephemeral media market and, as of January 2019, boasts half a billion daily Instagram Stories users (Statista, 2019). Launched roughly 2.5 years ago, in August 2016, Instagram Stories offers people a novel way of communicating through sharing photos and videos that, by default, are only available for 24 hours and then disappear. This phenomenon presents unique challenges for researchers but also demands additional attention in order to understand contemporary forms of sociability and meaning-making. This study examines people’s everyday engagements with ephemeral media through an exploration of more than 400 Instagram stories created during the 2019 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. While current public debates around ephemeral content revolve around how bad users have turned to the likes of Instagram and Snapchat in order to circumvent platform moderation (Gerrard, 2018) or boost engagement with brands (Trounce, 2018), we are interested in broader dynamics involved in the shift to temporary media for everyday social media communication. What factors drive user interaction with ephemeralcontent? How does the immediacy or 'liveness' (Amaral, 2018) of temporary media reconfigure the workings of digital publics, identity politics, and individual user experiences? This paper presents initial findings from phase one of an exploratory project that seeks to address these questions through the lens of ephemeral media on Instagram, and, in particular, through the practices associated with use of Instagram Stories around a key public event. We use the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for its concrete/time- bound nature and because it brings together history, politics, corporate, state, and community actors. This event is also replicated in one fashion or the other around the world; thereby opening up opportunities for future comparative studies. The event allows us to examine the nature of community engagement with ephemeral media, and the potential challenges and opportunities for identity politics brought about through Instagram Stories. The latest cutting-edge research in the digital media field places Instagram at the centre of emerging social media research (Serafinelli, 2018; Leaver, Highfield, & Abidin, 2019). However, research specifically on Stories, as a common feature of this platform, is scarce. Hence, this paper contributes to further extending developments in research on ephemeral media by examining user practices with Instagram Stories and their implications for everyday communication from a critical cultural studies perspective. It is guided by the following research questions: RQ1: How are ephemeral media changing user practices on Instagram?RQ2: What challenges and opportunities exist around platform affordances, like Stories, for Instagram users (e.g. modes of expression, loss of cultural archive, spread of false information, community engagement issues); andRQ3: How does the above play out in the context of an event focussed around identity politics, such as the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras?

Online abuse has become a matter of trust for social media platforms, whose role as a facilitator of public debate has been called into question. In response social media companies have become more active in regulating and banning particular users and channels. Through the use of affordances theory, this paper examines one example of the regulation of content on a social media site, the revamp of the quarantining function on Reddit in late 2018. Quarantines are designed to halt participation within and growth of subreddits without banning them outright. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the consequences of this revamp on two subreddits, r/Braincels and r/TheRedPill. Through studying activity levels on these subreddits the paper argues that quarantines did limit discussion within these subreddits. However, it also argues that the revamp had unintended consequences, in particular a growth in distrust between subreddit users and Reddit as a site, and a shift of users away from Reddit to less regulated sites. The paper argues that quarantining shifted the affordances of Reddit, in this instance resulting in greater discouragement of activity on particular subreddits. Using the mechanisms and conditions framework (Davis and Chouinard, 2016) the paper however argues that users adapted to and circumvented this discouragement to continue engaging in particular behavior. While quarantining had short term benefits, using an affordances framework this paper argues it had unintended consequences, ones which can result in a continued radicalization of actions and beliefs, furthering distrust in the online sphere.

In this panel we combine longitudinal and cross-national studies of social media in election campaigns, expanding the time span as well as number of countries compared to former studies. The four papers present longitudinal studies, covering multiple election cycles from four different countries: Australia, the United States of America, Denmark and Sweden. By including these cases we focus on countries considered to be “first movers” when it comes to the digitization and internetization of the political life. As such, they are “most similar cases”. However, they also have different political systems: the US and Australia are characterized by a Westminster system dominated by a few large parties and a tradition of strong confrontation between government and opposition, whereas Denmark and Sweden are multi-party systems with a tradition of collaboration and coalition governments. Further, the countries’ media systems, as defined by Hallin & Mancini (2004), differ significantly; the US is characterized by a commercialized American media system with little role for public service broadcasters, Denmark and Sweden have very strong public service media, and Australia has elements of both these systems. Technologically, the four countries might be similar, but politically and in terms of media systems, they differ. Thus, studies of the four countries form a diverse yet solid set of cases for exploring the growing (and changing) role of social media in national elections. The papers address such issues by various methods and perspectives, from large-scale big data analyses of tweets to content analyses of Facebook pages and surveys among citizens. From different angles, the four papers circle around the same topics: do social media contribute to narrowing or widening the often-discussed gap between citizens and politicians? Does the increasing use (and changing character) of social media in election campaigns facilitate increased trust or rather a radicalized and more negative discourse? And do citizens feel more empowered and enlightened in a democratic sense? The Australian case study is based on a comprehensive analysis of interactions around candidates’ Twitter accounts, drawing on state-of-the-art methods. It stretches across three election cycles. It presents new evidence both on the use of Twitter in political campaigning in Australia, and on the public response to this use, not at least in the light of the overall context of a decline in trust towards the political system, in Australia and elsewhere. The US case study examines negativity, incivility, and intolerance expressed by candidates running for governor in 2014 as compared with 2018. In between those two election cycles, the United States had the remarkable presidential campaign of 2016, with an unprecedented volume and style of negative campaigning unseen in modern campaigning. This study thus asks whether the 2018 candidates were more negative and uncivil than their counterparts who ran in 2014. Results will illuminate the nature of political incivility and whether there is a coarseness of political discourse in the United States. The Danish case study is based on surveys of citizens’ Internet use / social media use across four elections, covering a time span of 12 years. It adds to an understanding of the growing use of social media but more importantly it investigates how citizens experienced effects of social media as tools for agenda-setting and efficacy, the latter understood as increased reflection and enlightenment. The Swedish case study covers three Swedish national elections, in 2010, 2014 and 2018. The research question is: how are viral posts from political parties on Facebook changing over time? By answering that question, the author can track the consequences of increased platformization of politics as well as an increased targeting towards the needs and wants of the audience, through what some will call populism. The studies all cover more or less the last decade. This represents a time span during which social media have matured and have come to play an increasing role in citizens’ daily lives. The contributions are interesting country-based case studies in themselves, but through this panel we seek to engage the audience in a discussion of the developments expected for the coming years.