Also involving Assoc. Prof. Dan Angus and Dr Tobias Keller, the team is currently investigating the origins and spread of major conspiracy theories associated with the COVID-19 crisis across various social media platforms. Such conspiracy theories include false stories about coronavirus as a bioweapon created either in a Wuhan lab or by researchers associated with the Gates Foundation, and about connections between coronavirus and the roll-out of 5G mobile telephony technology.

Early results from this research point to the presence of a small but sustained coordinated effort by a network of Twitter accounts that pushed the bioweapon conspiracy story; such accounts were often associated with fringe political perspectives especially in the United States. Further, the research indicates that these conspiracy theories typically spread beyond the fringes of public discussion only once they are picked up and amplified by tabloid media exploiting them as clickbait, or by celebrities from the fields of music, movies, and sports who share them with their substantial social media audiences.

The research, which will be presented in extended form in a report for the Centre for Responsible Technology and subsequent scholarly publications, points to important inflection points in the trajectory of conspiracy theories from the fringes to the mainstream, and highlights a need both for further platform intervention against coordinated inauthentic behaviour and for the development of greater digital literacies not least also amongst influential social media users.

Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:

1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?

The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean everything and nothing. For example, what does it mean to be inside an filter bubble or echo chamber? Do you need to be completely cut off from the world around you, which seems to be what those metaphors suggest? Only in such extreme cases – which are perhaps similar to being in a cult that has completely disconnected from the rest of society – can the severe negative effects that the supporters of the echo chamber or filter bubble theories imagine actually become reality, because they assume that people in echo chambers or filter bubbles no longer see any content that disagrees with their political worldviews.

Now, such complete disconnection is not entirely impossible, but very difficult to achieve and maintain. And most of the empirical evidence we have points in the opposite direction. In particular, the immense success of extremist political propaganda (including ‘fake news’, another very problematic and poorly defined term) in the US, the UK, parts of Europe, and even in Brazil itself in recent years provides a very strong argument against echo chambers and filter bubbles: if we were all locked away in our own bubbles, disconnected from each other, then such content could not have travelled as far, and could not have affected as many people, as quickly as it appears to have done. Illiberal governments wouldn’t invest significant resources in outfits like the Russian ‘Internet Research Agency’ troll farm if their influence operations were confined to existing ideological bubbles; propaganda depends crucially on the absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles if it seeks to influence more people than those who are already part of a narrow group of hyperpartisans.

Alternatively, if we define echo chambers and filter bubbles much more loosely, in a way that doesn’t require the people inside those bubble to be disconnected from the world of information around them, then the terms become almost useless. With such a weak definition, any community of interest would qualify as an echo chamber or filter bubble: any political party, religious group, football club, or other civic association suddenly is an echo chamber or filter bubble because it enables people with similar interests and perspectives to connect and communicate with each other. But in that case, what’s new? Such groups have always existed in society, and society evolves through the interaction and contest between them – there’s no need to create new and poorly defined metaphors like ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ to describe this.

Some proponents of these metaphors claim that our new digital and social media have made things worse, though: that they have made it easier for people to create the first, strong type of echo chamber or filter bubble, by disconnecting from the rest of the world. But although this might sound sensible, there is practically no empirical evidence for this: for example, we now know that people who receive news from social media encounter a greater variety of news sources than those who don’t, and that those people who have the strongest and most partisan political views are also among the most active consumers of mainstream media. Even suggestions that platform algorithms are actively pushing people into echo chambers or filter bubbles have been disproven: Google search results, for instance, show very little evidence of personalisation at an individual level.

Part of the reason for this is that – unlike the people who support the echo chamber and filter bubble metaphors – most ordinary people actually don’t care much at all about politics. If there is any personalisation through the algorithms of Google, Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, it will be based on many personal attributes other than our political interests. As multi-purpose platforms, these digital spaces are predominantly engines of context collapse, where our personal, professional, and political lives intersect and crash into each other and where we encounter a broad and unpredictable mixture of content from a variety of viewpoints. Overall, these platforms enable all of us to find more diverse perspectives, not less.

And this is where these metaphors don’t just become dumb, but downright dangerous: they create the impression, first, that there is a problem, and second, that the problem is caused to a significant extent by the technologies we use. This is an explicitly technologically determinist perspective, ignoring the human element and assuming that we are unable to shape these technologies to our needs. And such views then necessarily also invite technological solutions: if we assume that digital and social media have caused the current problems in society, then we must change the technologies (through technological, regulatory, and legal adjustments) to fix those problems. It’s as if a simple change to the Facebook algorithm would make fascism disappear.

In my view, by contrast, our current problems are social and societal, economic and political, and technology plays only a minor role in them. That’s not to say that they are free of blame – Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other platforms could certainly do much more to combat hate speech and abuse on their platforms, for example. But if social media and even the Internet itself suddenly disappeared tomorrow, we would still have those same problems in society, and we would be no closer to solving them. The current overly technological focus of our public debates – our tendency to blame social media for all our problems – obscures this fact, and prevents us from addressing the real issues.

2. Polarisation is a political fact, not a technological one. How do you understand political and societal polarisation today?

To me, this is the real question, and one which has not yet been researched enough. The fundamental problem is not echo chambers and filter bubbles: it is perfectly evident that the various polarised groups in society are very well aware of each other, and of each other’s ideological positions – which would be impossible if they were each locked away in their own bubbles. In fact, they monitor each other very closely: research in the US has shown that far-right fringe groups are also highly active followers of ‘liberal’ news sites like the New York Times, for example. But they no longer follow the other side in order to engage in any meaningful political dialogue, aimed at finding a consensus that both sides can live with: rather, they monitor their opponents in order to find new ways to twist their words, create believable ‘fake news’ propaganda, and attack them with such falsehoods. And yes, they use digital and social media to do so, but again this is not an inherently technological problem: if they didn’t have social media, they’d use the broadcast or print media instead, just as the fascists did in the 1920s and 1930s and as their modern-day counterparts still do today.

So, for me the key question is how we have come to this point: put simply, why do hyperpartisans do what they do? How do they become so polarised – so sure of their own worldview that they will dismiss any opposing views immediately, and will see any attempts to argue with them or to correct their views merely as a confirmation that ‘the establishment’ is out to get them? What are the (social and societal, rather than simply technological) processes by which people get drawn to these extreme political fringes, and how might they be pulled back from there? This question also has strong psychological elements, of course: how do hyperpartisans form their worldview? How do they incorporate new evidence into it? How do they interpret, and in doing so defuse, any evidence that goes against their own perspectives? We see this across so many fields today: from political argument itself to the communities of people who believe vaccinations are some kind of global mind control experiment, or to those who still deny the overwhelming scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change. How do these people maintain their views even – and this again is evidence for the fact that echo chambers and filter bubbles are mere myths – they are bombarded on a daily basis with evidence of the fact that vaccinations save lives and that the global climate is changing with catastrophic consequences?

And since you include the word ‘today’ in your question, the other critical area of investigation in all this is whether any of this is new, and whether it is different today from the way it was ten, twenty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the one hand, it seems self-evident that we do see much more evidence of polarisation today than we have in recent decades: Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, and many others have clearly sensitised us to these deep divisions in many societies around the world. But most capitalist societies have always had deep divisions between the rich and the poor; the UK has always had staunch pro- and anti-Europeans; the US has always been racist. I think we need more research, and better ways of assessing, whether any of this has actually gotten worse in recent years, or whether it has simply become more visible.

For example, Trump and others have arguably made it socially acceptable in the US to be politically incorrect: to be deliberately misogynist; to be openly racist; to challenge the very constitutional foundations that the US political system was built on. But perhaps the people who now publicly support all this had always already been there, and had simply lacked the courage to voice their views in public – perhaps what has happened here is that Trump and others have smashed the spiral of silence that subdued such voices by credibly promising social and societal sanctions, and have instead created a spiral of reinforcement that actively rewards the expression of extremist views and leads hyperpartisans to try and outdo each other with more and more extreme statements. Perhaps the spiral of silence now works the other way, and the people who oppose such extremism now remain silent because they fear communicative and even physical violence.

Importantly, these are also key questions for media and communication research, but this research cannot take the simplistic perspective that ‘digital and social media are to blame’ for all of this. Rather, the question is to what extent the conditions and practices in our overall, hybrid media system – encompassing print and broadcast as well as digital and social media – have enabled such changes. Yes, digital and social platforms have enabled voices on the political fringes to publish their views, without editorial oversight or censorship from anyone else. But such voices find their audience often only once they have been amplified by more established outlets: for instance, once they have been covered – even if only negatively – by mainstream media journalists, or shared on via social media by more influential accounts (including even the US president himself). It is true that in the current media landscape, the flows of information are different from what they were in the past – not simply because of the technological features of the media, but because of the way that all of us (from politicians and journalists through to ordinary users) have chosen to incorporate these features into our daily lives. The question then is whether and how this affects the dynamics of polarisation, and what levers are available to us if we want to change those dynamics.

3. How can we continue critical research in social media after the APIcalypse?

With great tenacity and ingenuity even in the face of significant adversity – because we have a societal obligation to do so. I’ve said throughout my answers here that we cannot simplistically blame social media for the problems our societies are now facing: the social media technologies have not caused any of this. But the ways in which we, all of us, use social media – alongside other, older media forms – clearly play a role in how information travels and how polarisation takes place, and so it remains critically important to investigate the social media practices of ordinary citizens, of hyperpartisan activists, of fringe and mainstream politicians, of emerging and established journalists, of social bots and disinformation campaigns. And of course even beyond politics and polarisation, there are also many other important reasons to study social media.

The problem now is that over the past few years, many of the leading social media platforms have made it considerably more difficult for researchers even to access public and aggregate data about social media activities – a move I have described, in deliberately hyperbolic language, as the ‘APIcalypse’. Ostensibly, such changes were introduced to protect user data from unauthorised exploitation, but a convenient consequence of these access restrictions has been that independent, critical, public-interest research into social media practices has become a great deal more difficult even while the commercial partnerships between platforms and major corporations have remained largely unaffected. This limits our ability to provide an impartial assessment of social media practices and to hold the providers themselves to account for the effects of any changes they might make to their platforms, and increasingly forces scholars who seek to work with platform data into direct partnership arrangements that operate under conditions favouring the platform providers.

This requires several parallel responses from the scholarly community. Of course we must explore the new partnership models offered by the platforms, but we should treat these with a considerable degree of scepticism and cannot solely rely on such limited data philanthropy; in particular, the platforms are especially unlikely to provide data access in contexts where scholarly research might be highly critical of their actions. We must therefore also investigate other avenues for data gathering: this includes data donations from users of these platforms (modelled for instance on ProPublica’s browser plugin that captures the political ads encountered by Facebook users) or data scraping from the Websites of the platforms as an alternative to API-based data access, for example.

Platforms may seek to shut down such alternative modes of data gathering (as Facebook sought to do with the ProPublica browser plugin), or change their Terms of Service to explicitly forbid such practices – and this should lead scholars to consider whether the benefits of their research outweigh the platform’s interests. Terms of Service are often written to the maximum benefit of the platform, and may not be legally sound under applicable national legislation; the same legislation may also provide ‘fair use’ or ‘academic freedom’ exceptions that justify the deliberate breach of Terms of Service restrictions in specific contexts. As scholars, we must remember that we have a responsibility to the users of the platform, and to society as such, as well as to the platform providers. We must balance these responsibilities, by taking care that the user data we gather remain appropriately protected as we pursue questions of societal importance, and we should minimise the impact of our research on the legitimate commercial interests of the platform unless there is a pressing need to reveal malpractice in order to safeguard society. To do so can be a very difficult balancing act, of course.

Finally, we must also maintain our pressure on the platforms to provide scholarly researchers with better interfaces for data access, well beyond limited data philanthropy schemes that exclude key areas of investigation. Indeed, we must enlist others – funding bodies, policymakers, civil society institutions, and the general public itself – in bringing that pressure to bear: it is only in the face of such collective action, coordinated around the world, that these large and powerful corporations are likely to adjust their data access policies for scholarly research. And it will be important to confirm that they act on any promises of change they might make: too often have the end results they delivered not lived up to the grand rhetoric with which they were announced.

In spite of all of this, however, I want to end on a note of optimism: there still remains a crucial role for research that investigates social media practices, in themselves and especially also in the context of the wider, hybrid media system of older and newer media, and we must not and will not give up on this work. In the face of widespread hyperpartisanship and polarisation, this research is now more important than ever – and the adversities we are now confronted with are also a significant source of innovation in research methods and frameworks.

Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.

But these metaphors are built on very flimsy foundations, and it’s high time that we examined the actual evidence for their existence with a critical eye. That’s what my book Are Filter Bubbles Real? sets out to do. There are several recent studies that claim to have identified filter bubbles and echo chambers in search results and social media discussions, yet there are just as many that find no evidence or report contradictory results, so what’s really going on here? Is the impact of these phenomena on public opinion really as significant as common sense seems to suggest?

As it turns out, neither concept is particularly well-defined, and even the authors who first introduced these metaphors to media and communication studies rarely ventured far beyond anecdote and supposition. In the book, I introduce more rigorous definitions, and re-evaluate some of the key research findings of recent studies against these new criteria – and as it turns out, most claims about echo chambers and filter bubbles and their negative impacts on society are significantly overblown. These concepts are very suggestive metaphors, but ultimately they’re myths.

This shouldn’t actually surprise us. Imagine how difficult it would be to completely encapsulate yourself in an echo chamber or filter bubble, in order to receive only information that fits your existing worldview – not just on a single Facebook group or Twitter hashtag, not just on a single social media platform, but in every aspect of your life. To do so is not impossible, strictly speaking – cult members do it. But it requires a level of effort that few ordinary people are likely to commit to.

And in fact, it turns out that those whom we most expect to be caught in filter bubbles – hyperpartisans on the political fringes – are also most actively engaged with the mainstream media, even if they read them from a critical, oppositional perspective. The filter bubble and echo chamber myths have kept us from seeing this more clearly; they’ve sought to blame technology for problems that are, unfortunately, all too human – the unwillingness of polarised political groups in society to engage with one another in order to develop mutual understanding and consensus.

It’s high time we cut through those myths and shifted our focus to the cognitive processes and ideological mindsets that produce such polarisation – and I hope that the critical re-appraisal presented in Are Filter Bubbles Real? can contribute to that shift.

Axel Bruns is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author and editor of several books, including Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere and Twitter and Society. His latest book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, is now available from Polity.

The Nordicom Review article was published under an open access licence – here’s the full abstract:

Previous research into social media platforms has often focused on the exceptional: key moments in politics, sports or crisis communication. For Twitter, it has usually centred on hashtags or keywords. Routine and everyday social media practices remain underexamined as a result; the literature has overrepresented the loudest voices: those users who contribute actively to popular hashtags. This article addresses this imbalance by exploring in depth the day-to-day patterns of activity within the Australian Twittersphere for a 24-hour period in March 2017. We focus especially on the previously less visible everyday social media practices that this shift in perspective reveals. This provides critical new insights into where, and how, to look for evidence of onlife traces in a systematic way.

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.

This major new volume is designed as a sequel – rather than simply an updated edition – of my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Picking up where the previous book left off, Gatewatching and News Curation documents how professional and citizen journalism, and news audiences’ everyday engagement with journalism and journalists, has developed over the past decade and more. It shows that the practice of gatewatching is now more central to all of this than ever before (that it has become demotic) – but also that it has continued to transform and adapt to new communicative platforms, most centrally including social media like Twitter and Facebook. As a result, although the fabled ‘random acts of journalism’ might not have eventuated, most social media users now perform habitual acts of news curation instead.

The book covers these changes to news users’ engagement with journalism, both in the context of breaking news and in everyday newssharing practices, and how this has changed the news itself; it then reviews how both journalists and news organisations have attempted to respond to this transformation, variously by proactively embracing change or burying their heads in the sand, and highlights the format of news liveblogs as a key example of the new realities of news in a hybrid media environment. It concludes by reflecting on the impact that our changing, complex social news media system must have on our understanding of the public sphere.

I’m delighted with the advance praise the book has already received, some of which is here, along with a PDF of the book’s introductory chapter. The book itself is available from Peter Lang, Amazon, and other booksellers – and the eBook version comes under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licence! The introductory chapter is available on my Website as a reading sample.

At a time of such intense focus on the intersections and conflicts between journalism and social media, I hope this book makes a valuable contribution to the debate. My sincere thanks to everybody who has helped me refine the thoughts presented here.

Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past industry responses to just about any new media form and format, seen most recently for example in the ‘blog wars’ of the 2000s –, journalists and news outlets have now gradually and often grudgingly accepted social media as tools of the trade, and as spaces where news producers and news users come together in new and unforeseen configurations. The question now is whether – as with blogs – the journalism industry will be able to normalise and thus tame this new phenomenon, or whether this time around it is journalism and journalists that will be normalised into social media environments.

My sincere thanks for the entire team at Haifa University for the opportunity to present this keynote at the Symposium, and especially to Daphne Raban for her exceptional hospitality – and many thanks also to Nik John, Karine Nahon, and everyone else whom I caught up with along the way.

Stephen Harrington, Axel Bruns, and Tim Highfield. “Infotainment and the Impact of ‘Connective Action’: The Case of #MilkedDry.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, Sydney, 6 July 2017.

Axel Bruns, Brenda Moon, and Ehsan Dehghan. “Dynamics of a Scandal: The Centrelink Robodebt Affair on Twitter.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, Sydney, 7 July 2017.

That’s why archaeological finds of items as mundane as the cuneiform tablets of ancient Uruk, recording the inventories of its food stores, or the pot shards of Deir el-Medina, providing medical prescriptions for the workers of Egypt, are so valuable – they offer direct glimpses of how ordinary people lived and worked during those times.

But even in much more recent, much better-documented times, historians have still had to go to great lengths to gather the documentary evidence required to fully understand historical events and actors. From the US Civil War to the Holocaust and beyond, they have initiated projects to collect the letters written by ordinary people during extraordinary times – and of course they also draw on print, radio, and TV journalism, if those records are still available.

Beyond Journalism’s Draft of History

Indeed, journalism has long been described as “a first rough draft of history”: collectively, what they report on represents journalists’ first take not only on what their readers, listeners and viewers need to know now, but also on what is relevant to record for the future.

But in a complex world, such judgments are rarely straightforward. The reality of anthropogenic climate change has taken years, even decades to sink in – and some people, including some journalists, still choose to live in denial. The domino effect leading from unsound lending practices in the US mortgage market to the election of the Syriza government in Greece would have been difficult to foresee, and so the early stages of the crisis received less coverage than in hindsight they should have. And the various impacts of these developments on the lives of millions around the world cannot be documented by journalists alone.

Neither, these days, do they need to be. The past decade has seen an unprecedented shift towards what Manuel Castells has described as “mass self-communication” via social media. Hundreds of millions of users around the world are publicly or semi-publicly recording what matters to them, from (apparently) mundane activities to major world events.

News of earthquakes in Nepal and terror attacks in Paris now breaks on Twitter even before journalists have arrived at the scene, and some events – such as the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan – were even covered purely by accident, as bystanders remarked on the unusual military activity in the area. Elsewhere, the immense social media response to events from the British royal wedding to the death of Prince serves as a better reflection of public sentiment than any obituary ever could.

In their ability to instantly gather and coordinate the collective public response to current events, then, social media don’t just write history. They represent something much more immediate: social media are a first draft of the present, as my colleague Katrin Weller and I argue in a paper for the Web Science conference in Hannover in May 2016. But like all drafts, theirs is fragile and easily lost – a loss which, we believe, would impact significantly on future historians’ ability to understand the story of humanity in the early twenty-first century.

What follows from this is an acute need to address the preservation of social media content. This is complicated by the considerable volume and rapid growth of such archives, and the inherently proprietary nature of the leading social media platforms: both create substantial technical and organisational challenges for any large-scale archiving project.

Current Archiving Projects

Perhaps the most widely known social media archiving project commenced when in 2010, Twitter ‘gifted’ a continuous archive of all public tweets since its launch in 2006 to the US Library of Congress. Beyond the initial fanfare, which generated some much-needed positive PR for Twitter, not much more progress appears to have been made, though. A 2013 update on the Library’s blog made positive noises about the development of the archive, but by 2015 researchers still hadn’t been granted access. Washington insiders Politico called the Library’s Twitter archiving project “a huge #FAIL”, blaming the Library’s poor understanding of emerging technologies.

Closer to home, the Australian Research Council has funded the TrISMA project (which I lead), which has built the infrastructure to track the public posting activities of the nearly three million Australian Twitter accounts identified so far, and the public debates unfolding on Australian Facebook pages. To date, it has captured more than one billion tweets posted by Australians. Led by Queensland University of Technology and supported by a consortium of Australian universities, the project also collaborates with the National Library of Australia, which will eventually house an archive of the full collection, and preserve it for future use.

Such projects must necessarily be speculative in their approach to archiving social media’s first draft of the present. The future remains largely unpredictable, and we cannot foresee which part of the social media record future historians may be interested in. Where will the next Curie or Einstein, the next Björk or Bowie, the next Obama or Malala come from? We don’t know, but we’ll want to preserve their own social media activities, as well as the public response to them.

The best solution is therefore to capture all that we can, as comprehensively as we can, and to let those future historians make their own choices from the available record. Some might argue that platforms like Facebook and Twitter themselves already do so: that their proprietary archives are necessarily the most comprehensive, and that no additional archiving efforts are required. But because they are proprietary, these archives are largely closed even to publicly funded, public-interest research – and their longer-term survival is inherently tied to the fortunes of the companies that own them. As past cases from GeoCities to MySpace have shown, even Facebook and Twitter may not be around forever.

The great journalism scholar Herbert Gans once wrote that, as they choose what information makes it into their first draft of history, “the news may be too important to leave to the journalists alone”. The same is true for social media: its first draft of the present is too important to leave to social media platforms to preserve. It’s high time to address the task of building comprehensive archives of our public communication through social media, in order to document our present for the benefit of future generations.

The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics

From Anonymous to the Scottish Independence Referendum, from oppositional politics in Azerbaijan to elections in Kenya, the Companion covers a broad range of social media uses and impacts. It combines this with a number of keystone chapters that review and update existing political communication theory for a social media context.

The introduction to the volume is available here:

Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen. “Introduction.” The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, eds. Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen. New York: Routledge, 2016. 1-3.