A substantial number of new social media research publications from the Digital Media Research Centre have recently shown up on QUT’s ePrints repository. Here’s an overview:

Tanya Notley, Michael Dezuanni, Hua Flora Zhong, and Saffron Howden. (2017) News and Australia’s Children: How Young People Access, Perceive and Are Affected by the News. Sydney: Western Sydney University, Queensland University of Technology, and Crinkling News.

This report finds that young Australians consume a lot of news regularly and they get this news from many different sources. Engaging with news stories makes young people feel happy, motivated and knowledgeable. However, many young Australians do not trust news media organisations and perceive they are biased. Most believe news media organisations don’t understand young people’s lives and more than one third say the news does not cover the issues that matter to them. While social media is popular for getting news, only one third of young people are confident about spotting fake news online while more than half never or rarely try to work if news stories they encounter online are true or not.

Molly Dragiewicz, Jean Burgess, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez, Michael Salter, Nic Suzor, Delanie Woodlock, and Bridget Harris. (2018) Technology Facilitated Coercive Control: Domestic Violence and the Competing Roles of Digital Media Platforms. Feminist Media Studies, in Press.

This article describes domestic violence as a key context of online misogyny, foregrounding the role of digital media in mediating, coordinating, and regulating it; and proposing an agenda for future research. We propose the term “technology facilitated coercive control” (TFCC) to encompass the technological and relational aspects of patterns of abuse against intimate partners.

Bernhard Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Òscar Coromina. (2018) From Ranking Algorithms to ‘Ranking Cultures’: Investigating the Modulation of Visibility in YouTube Search Results. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24(1), pp. 50-68.

Algorithms, as constitutive elements of online platforms, are increasingly shaping everyday sociability. Developing suitable empirical approaches to render them accountable and to study their social power has become a prominent scholarly concern. This article proposes an approach to examine what an algorithm does, not only to move closer to understanding how it works, but also to investigate broader forms of agency involved. To do this, we examine YouTube’s search results ranking over time in the context of seven sociocultural issues.

Nic Suzor, Sarah Myers West, Nathalie Maréchal, and Sarah Roberts. (2017) Making Methodological Progress in Studying Content Regulation. All Things in Moderation, UCLA, 6-7 Dec. 2017.

Scholars face serious difficulties in gaining access to examine the practices of content moderation within commercial platforms. Much remains shrouded in secrecy. In this panel, we consider the opportunities for methodological innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration to help progress future research.

Nic Suzor, Sarah Myers West, Tarleton Gillespie, and Jillian York. (2017) Guiding Principles for the Future of Content Moderation. All Things in Moderation, UCLA, 6-7 Dec. 2017.

With increasing attention to the labor, criteria, and implications of content moderation, come opportunities for real change in the ways that platforms are governed. In light of this pressure and the opportunities it implies, this roundtable considers options for the future of content moderation. The question is not just how the moderation apparatus should change, but what principles should guide these changes.

Jiajie Lu. (2017) The Global Expansion of China-Based Social Media Platforms and Its Dynamics in the Australian Context. In Mike Kent, Kate Ellis, and Jian Xu (eds.), Chinese Social Media: Social, Cultural, and Political Implications. London: Routledge, pp. 191-205.

In recent years, the China-based social media platforms have become a widely adopted communication measure of the Chinese diaspora in Australia. This chapter explores the adoption of major China-based social media platforms such as QQ and WeChat amongst the Chinese diaspora in Australia and its dynamics.

Elija Cassidy and Wilfred Yang. (2018) Gay Men’s Digital Cultures beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE Use in the Gay Chinese Diaspora of Australia. Information, Communication & Society 21(6): 851-865.

Recent research on gay men’s digital cultures has focused predominantly on Western, English-language-based sites and populations. This article presents research in progress on the social chat application LINE and its use amongst the Chinese diaspora of gay men in Australia.

Axel Bruns and Gunn Enli. (2018) The Norwegian Twittersphere: Structure and Dynamics. Nordicom Review 30 Jan. 2018, pp. 1-20.

This article takes a new approach to the comprehensive study of an entire national Twittersphere. It provides new insights into the historical development of the Norwegian Twittersphere, its current network structure and the presence of diverse interests and issues amongst the nearly one million accounts within this community.

Rachel Hews. (2017) High-Profile Criminal Trials, Social Media Conversations and Media Regulation in Australia. Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program 2017, Oxford, 3-14 July 2017.

Rachel Hews. (2017) Social Media and Juries: Using Network Mapping to Understand How Prejudicial Conversations about Criminal Trials Flow in Social Networks. Privacy, Politics and Law: In Conversation with Professor Paul De Hert, University of Melbourne, 2 Oct. 2017.

The rapid growth of public conversations on social media platforms is placing significant pressure on the legal principle of a right to a fair trial by an impartial jury. In order to better understand the potential for these conversations to influence jurors and affect fairness in criminal trials, it is important to understand how potentially prejudicial information flows in social networks. We use social network analysis and mapping to better understand the content and shape of the Twitter discourse around the high-profile murder trials of Gerard Baden-Clay and Gable Tostee.

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. (2018) Approaches and Methods for the Study of Social Media in Political Communication. Aurora: Revista de Arte, Mídia e Política, 10(30), pp. 146-159.

Emerging from a collaboration with researchers at PUC São Paulo, this is one contribution to a special issue of Aurora (in Portuguese and English) on the use of social media analytics in researching Brazilian politics.