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.

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.

There are three major stories in this campaign:

1. Who will form government? The incumbent Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition are fighting the election separately, and frequently in opposition to each other. Experts and polls suggest that a whole range of outcomes are possible, including both majority government for the Conservatives and Labour, however the smart money suggests either a minority government (7/4 Labour, 5/2 Conservatives) or a coalition. Amongst the coalition options, a renewal of the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition is possible (6/1), as is a partnership between the Liberal Democrats and Labour (13/2). The Scottish Nationals are another possible coalition partner for Labour (16/1 or 20/1 with the Lib Dems also included), while UKIP and the Democratic Unionists may still be needed to get either party over the line. Unusually for the UK then, we have a lot of electoral calculus in play.
2. How will Scotland vote? As above, the SNP may play a role in a coalition, but Scotland seems set to vote on very different grounds from the rest of the UK. A recent poll suggested that almost half of both Labour and Conservative voters would consider tactically voting for the other major (English) party, if it prevented the SNP being elected in their seat – something that would be unheard of in basically any other seat, in a hangover from the Scottish Referendum. That said, they are still expected to gain a large number of seats in Scotland, and thus put themselves in a position of power at Westminster.
3. Finally, there’s the UKIP factor. As the graphs below show, UKIP are one of the most talked-about parties of the campaign, well ahead of their expected representation in parliament (although, we should acknowledge, the UK has a first-past-the-post system, and UKIP’s representation would likely be higher in a proportional system). Paddy Power suggest that they will receive fewer than 3.5 seats (8/11), compared to 43.5 for SNP, yet the two seem to be roughly equivalent in terms of discussion on Twitter. Of course, pure volume of conversation doesn’t tell the full story, and much of the conversation around UKIP may be negative in nature – yet, our overall sentiment gauge shows little difference between UKIP and the other political parties in that regard. So, this will be interesting to watch — will interest in UKIP die down as their political prospects recede, or will we see a surprise on election day?

Aside from these, our live graphs of Twitter activity around the election tell a story of their own and are designed to be explored on a daily or even hourly basis as the social media conversation shifts in volume, tone and topic during the campaign. Previously, we have seen that major shifts in conversation do not just make for interesting journalism, but can also be cause of speculation about how the election might actually play out. We are expecting to see a more exciting representation of the conversation during this election, compared to our previous work in Queensland and new South Wales, due to the higher volume of election-related social media conversations across the UK.

The most notable change compared to our previous election coverage is the addition of the pie charts, which we think provide a much clearer visualisation of the share of conversation, and clearly compare the whole-of-campaign trends with developments over the past 24 hours. Also included are sentiment breakdowns per party, alongside currently trending hashtags, and an analysis of the total conversation volume over time.

Overall Conversation Share

Sentiment

Volume of Conversation

We plan to release some further graphs as the 7 May election date approaches – including a look at particular battleground seats, and a breakdown of the “positive” conversation around parties.

Hypometer is also undergoing some significant development in the lead-up to our first launch product – also to be released in May. You can follow the progress on the Hypometer project blog.

Full details are below – please pay particularly close attention to the Eligibility Requirements.

The Project

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate to participate in an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project which draws on several ‘big data’ sources on Australian online public communication.

This PhD project provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the flow of information across the Australian online public sphere at large scale and in close to real time, within a world-class research environment. With an ERA ranking of 5 (well above world standing), Creative Industries at QUT is the leading institution for Media and Communication research in Australia, and ARC Future Fellow Professor Axel Bruns is an international research leader in the area of Internet studies.

The PhD researcher will be supervised by the ARC Future Fellow. This position will be located on the QUT Kelvin Grove campus, Brisbane, and will commence in mid-2015.

The researcher will carry out a range of tasks associated with project activities, including:

• using data collection and analysis methods and instruments developed for the project for a variety of purposes, including:
  • post hoc research into user activity patterns and information flows in the Australian online public sphere across a wide range of cases;
  • speedy and agile analysis of online activities in issue publics related to current events, and publication of initial analysis;
  • input into further development of online media tracking and analysis methods and instruments developed by the project.
• contributing to the development of new models of communication processes in the Australian online public sphere by:
  • tracing the trajectories of intermedia information flows across the diverse datasets available to the project;
  • developing and testing a range of preliminary models for the conceptualisation of issue publics and other formations of public discourse in online environments;
  • contributing to the integration of these models into a more comprehensive framework for understanding processes of communication across the contemporary media ecology.
• contributing to the dissemination of research findings from the project by:
  • publishing preliminary analyses and findings in relevant outlets (The Conversation, project website and other publications, etc.);
  • presenting project findings at relevant national and international conferences in media and communication and related fields;
  • publishing research outcomes from the project in sole- and collaboratively authored articles and chapters in high-profile journals and books.

This PhD project supports an ARC Future Fellowship research project investigating intermedia information flows in the Australian online public sphere. The emergence of new media forms has led to a profound transformation of the Australian media environment: mainstream, niche, and social media intersect in many ways, online and offline. Increased access to large-scale data on public communication online enables an observation of how the nation responds to the news of the day, how themes and topics unfold, and how interest publics develop and decline over time.

Eligibility Requirements

You must have:

• first class honours (H1), or equivalent, in media and communication or a closely related area;
• demonstrated expertise in research on the contemporary public sphere and on information flows in online and social media;
• demonstrated knowledge of, and entry-level experience with, qualitative and quantitative research that uses innovative methods drawing on ‘big social data’ from social media and other relevant online sources;
• demonstrated understanding of current themes and issues in Australian public debate, and of the contemporary Australian media environment;
• effective written, interpersonal and computer-mediated communication skills;
• demonstrated computing skills, including familiarity with digital research management and social media research tools.

How to Apply

You’ll need to submit:

• your CV;
• the names of two referees;
• a detailed statement addressing the eligibility criteria.

Send your application to Professor Axel Bruns (a.bruns@qut.edu.au) by the closing date.

What Happens Next

We’ll award the scholarship based on academic merit, research experience and potential.

If your profile meets the eligibility requirements you’ll be asked to submit a formal application for admission to the PhD.

Further details are available on the QUT Website.

The New South Wales Election Social Index (NSWESI) tracks a combination of the key hashtags (#nswpol, #nswvotes, etc.), keywords relating to the parties and politicians, and tweets by and @mentions of candidates across all parties, to the extent that we have been able to identify their Twitter accounts. We’re combining the headline figures from our analysis of this dataset into three live graphs which are embedded below, and which are available for embedding on other sites. The graphs are updated with new data every five minutes.

In addition to the analytics for the various parties, and for the two major parties, this time around we are also adding some experimental sentiment analysis. As is by now well-established, sentiment analysis of individual messages – especially when they are as short as tweets – is very difficult, as standard sentiment solutions are struggling considerably with rhetorical devices like irony and sarcasm. However, in aggregate this analysis may still generate some useful overall patterns – but please take them with a grain of salt for now.

NSWESI: Overall patterns across the parties

NSWESI: Major party contest

NSWESI: Sentiment and trending topics

To embed these graphs on your own site, please use the following code:

<img src=”http://dev.thehypometer.com/images/election-allparty.png” style=”width:600px”> <img src=”http://dev.thehypometer.com/images/election-2party.png” style=”width:600px”> <img src=”http://dev.thehypometer.com/images/election-sentiment.png” style=”width:600px”>

Hypometer is a QUT-based commercial start-up which tracks and ranks social media activity around major topics, events and brands with assistance from qutbluebox, the University’s innovation and knowledge transfer company. For more information on The Hypometer, please contact Katie Prowd (k2.prowd@qut.edu.au). For more information about the principles behind Hypometer technology, see the Telemetrics Project.

As in previous elections, the core focus for our social media analytics activities remains on Twitter, though this time we’re also adding Instagram to the mix. For the purposes of our analysis, we are tracking a combination of the key hashtags (#qldpol, #qldvotes, etc.) and keywords relating to the major parties and their leaders, as well as tweets by and @mentions of all of the Twitter accounts associated with local candidates across all Queensland electorates.

But while in earlier elections we’ve posted weekly updates of the major social media trends, this time we’re moving to a real-time visualisation format. Working with the team behind last November’s G20 Hypometer, which was featured extensively on television and in online publications during the course of the event, we’ve now launched the Queensland Election Social Index (QESI):

The QESI Hypometer (click here for full size) combines the Twitter and Instagram data to show the focus of current social media discussions about the election, aggregated by party. Mentions of the major parties within popular hashtags such as #qldpol, #qldvotes and #qldvotes2015 are incorporated in real time, while mentions of the candidates of each political party are added on a slightly delayed basis. Percentage changes are shown on a day-by-day basis, while the volume graph is updated each hour.

A second QESI Hypometer focusses specifically on the two major parties, and also compares mentions of the party leaders, Campbell Newman and Anastacia Palaszczuk, also in real time. This Hypometer (full size here) shows the top trending hashtags within the election discussion.

To date, there has been a notable shift in conversation, from a strong focus on the LNP during the first week of the campaign (at times commanding  more than 70% of the total conversation) towards a greater level of debate about the ALP: towards the end of the second campaign week, the LNP is capturing a little over 54% of the total conversation since the election was declared. Together, Labor and the LNP clearly dominate the conversation, however, with the minor parties recording less than 5% between them. Campbell Newman also remains a far more frequent topic of discussion than Anastacia Palaszczuk, with a share of over 79% of the conversation. In total, at the time of writing the QESI Hypometer has tracked almost 85,000 posts across Twitter and Instagram since 6 January.

Refresh this page every hour or so to see the latest updates on how these numbers are developing. We’ll also post further analysis of key trends and developments over the remainder of the election campaign, and hope to deploy a similar election Hypometer again for the New South Wales election in a couple of months.

The two QESI Hypometers are also available for embedding:

<iframe style="overflow: hidden; height: 700px; width: 100%;" src="http://dev.thehypometer.com/election-allparty/embed" 
width="100%" height="1000px" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" border="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

<iframe style="overflow: hidden; height: 700px; width: 100%;" src="http://dev.thehypometer.com/election-2party/embed" 
width="100%" height="1000px" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"></iframe>

Hypometer is a QUT-based commercial start-up which tracks and ranks social media activity around major topics, events and brands with assistance from qutbluebox, the University’s innovation and knowledge transfer company. For more information on The Hypometer, please contact Katie Prowd (k2.prowd@qut.edu.au). For more information about the principles behind Hypometer technology, see the Telemetrics Project.

I’m now getting ready to get ATNIX started up again, though, and hopefully to make some further additions that will prove useful in the longer term. To get us started, I thought it might be useful to post a long-term overview of ATNIX trends since we started the index in mid-2012. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a growing adoption of Twitter in Australia, to a point where there are now more than 2.8 million accounts in the Australian Twittersphere – and it seems logical that this would also manifest in changes to the sharing patterns for Australian news sites on Twitter.

Indeed, the total volume of tweets sharing links to Australian news sites has increased during these two years – as has, it should be noted, the number of news sites we’ve tracked. In total, since mid-2012 (and allowing for a handful of server outages), we’ve captured some 20 million tweets in total, containing more than 24.5 million URLs. And those numbers have increased steadily: while in July 2012, we saw a total of 677,000 tweets linking to our Australian news sites, by July 2014 that number had grown to more than one million. (In fact, 2014 has seen particularly strong growth, perhaps due to the substantial confluence of various domestic and international events and crises.)

Broken down across the 35 Australian news and opinion sites we are currently tracking, these patterns look as follows (click to enlarge, and ignore the obvious drop-outs due to server maintenance in November 2013):

For long-term followers of our ATNIX data, it is immediately evident that the overall rankings amongst the major news sites have remained largely stable: ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald remain the most widely shared news sites in Australia by some margin (and, it seems, by a margin that continues to increase relative to their nearest competitors). In the second tier, The Age and news.com.au are similarly running neck-and-neck. And they are followed, finally, by the rest of the field, with some of those sites occasionally recording major spikes due to the viral dissemination of single stories.

A closer look reveals a few more interesting patterns, however. The SMH appears to have recovered from a lengthy slump in popularity that began in early 2013, which saw it fall back from ABC News’ tail, and since April 2014 has been shadowing its major competitor much more closely once again. Amongst the opinion and commentary sites, The Conversation is the obvious market leader, though this is also boosted by its new-found transnational reach, with strong take-up in the UK and elsewhere – and it should be noted that following the site’s conversion from a .edu.au to a .com address we missed some months of data early this year, so its lead over nearest competitor Crikey would likely be even greater. And overall, the greatest spike in news sharing activity occurred, unsurprisingly, during the last federal election, when we captured more than 50,000 tweets linking to ABC News for the election week alone.

Sadly absent from this chart, however, are Guardian Australia and Daily Mail Australia. Due to their lack of a dedicated Australian domain, or of any other markers identifying their Australian coverage, we’re unable to separate Australia-specific news sharing activities from the global Guardian and Mail brands, and therefore cannot include them here. (We’re choosing to include The Conversation despite its now international audience, however, because it originated and continues to be substantively based in Australia.) Eventually, as we develop our data gathering approach further, we hope to develop the methods to better identify Australian-based sharing of news from these sources.

Introducing Experian Hitwise Data

As we develop ATNIX further, we also hope to place it into a wider context by comparing these Twitter-based news sharing patterns with reading and sharing activities elsewhere. We’ll soon attempt to tackle Facebook, but for now, here’s a glimpse of a very different data source: Experian Hitwise. Experian Marketing Services collects anonymous data at ISP level through opt-in panels about the Web searching and browsing patterns of Australian Internet users, and in the graph below I’ve compiled the site visit statistics for the same sites which we are tracking as part of ATNIX, for the same timeframe:

Total visits to Australian news and opinion sites, July 2012 to September 2014. Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services Australia.

Once again, a significant rise in the total number of visits to news sites by Australian Internet users since the start of 2014 is evident, corresponding to a similar rise in news sharing during this time; we’re also seeing a matching dip in late April/early May, during the Easter / ANZAC Day holiday period. However, the ranking of news sites is markedly different: since early 2014, the market leader in Australian online news is news.com.au, even if such leadership doesn’t result in a similarly strong result in news sharing as we measure it through ATNIX. Conversely, ATNIX leader ABC News ranks ‘only’ fifth amongst the most read news sites in Australia.

Amongst the opinion and commentary sites, The Conversation and Crikey lead the Experian Hitwise rankings, too, but the rest of the leaderboard is structured quite differently. This is probably an indication of the respective positioning of these sites: to attract a loyal readership in their own right, to encourage the viral distribution of their articles, or both. Experian Hitwise records a surprisingly strong readership for The Morning Bulletin, for example, while ATNIX does not show its content to be very widely shared through Twitter; conversely, New Matilda content is widely shared, but according to the Experian Hitwise figures it does not seem to have a very large regular audience.

And finally, the Experian Hitwise numbers also provide us with a glimpse of Guardian Australia’s and Daily Mail Australia’s market positioning: by late September they’ve managed to rise to eight and fifth place on the Experian Hitwise chart, respectively, and continue to trend gradually upwards. We’ll watch their further development with interest.

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Experian Marketing Services Australia. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.

As part of their visit, Christoph and Christian also kindly agreed to update us on their wider research activities, and presented a Creative Industries Faculty research seminar last Friday, which we streamed live via YouTube. Below is a video of their presentation – unfortunately our camera ended up overexposing the image and so the slides aren’t very well visible, but they’re also available as a separate document here.

With the purpose of trying out some new tools and ideas, I collected tweets about Toronto’s WorldPride festival, which took place this past June. It was a huge shindig and while I wasn’t able to capture every relevant tweet, the 6 hashtags that I tracked* (#WP14TO, #WorldPride, #PrideToronto, #TorontoPride, #PrideTO, #WPTO14) turned up a pretty good dataset totalling 68,231 tweets. This dataset showed some cool trends relating to participation, especially people’s awesome selfies and photo documentation of the WorldPride parade (check out the National Post’s photos if you’re lacking rainbows in your life). I hope to eventually share some of these broader analyses but today I just wanted to look at a little bump that showed up after the festival, circled in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Total WorldPride tweets over time

This little spike of nearly 1000 tweets happened when Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford – fresh out of rehab, as all the latest news stories note – refused to join in the standing ovation at a city council meeting to thank WorldPride’s coordinators. That’s right, everyone else stood up and clapped but Ford, with his history of avoiding Toronto Pride and opposing visible support for LGBTQ people throughout the city, remained seated. Apparently, to add insult to injury, all of this came alongside Ford casting the only vote against launching a study to determine if more homeless shelter space for LGBTQ youth is needed in Toronto.

So what did Torontonians do? Well, when the incident first happened, some of the city councillors tweeted about it. This is reflected in the first bump in Figure 2, when many people retweeted these preliminary expressions of disappointment with Ford’s behaviour. Figure 2 shows the volume of tweets over time for the bump that was circled in Figure 1 but here I’ve also plugged a bit of code into Tableau to show the different types of tweets. You can see that this whole Twitter event was characterized by people retweeting, often using the popular #TOpoli (Toronto politics) alongside the WorldPride hashtags.

Figure 2. Rob Ford incident over time, sorted by tweet type

The mainstream press caught wind of the story and a bit later in the day, CBC News tweeted about it, adding a photo of Rob Ford sitting during the applause. However, the real kicker in terms of momentum happened when media personality Jian Ghomeshi (broadcaster, musician, host of Q) made a tweet that resonated with a bunch of people:

It’s not the drugs/alcohol, it’s this… RT @CBCNews Toronto Mayor Rob Ford doesn’t stand for #WorldPride ovation. pic.twitter.com/Z33MFpYmhx

— jian ghomeshi (@jianghomeshi) July 9, 2014

Okay, so Ghomeshi’s tweet wasn’t an original, he simply added his own opinion to the CBC’s previous tweet. But the combination of celebrity critique with the compelling visual made this the most popular retweet of the whole debacle, raking in nearly 300 retweets in my dataset and gaining even a few more that weren’t captured during my data collection.

What does it mean that retweets dominated the dialogue throughout this whole spectacle? Does it show that mainstream media still has the loudest voice even on social media platforms, which are often lauded as being participatory and democratizing? Perhaps. Does it mean that Torontonians are lazy and would rather just press the ‘retweet’ button than weigh in with their own opinions? I think not.

Retweeting IS a form of participation (boyd, Golder & Lotan, 2010). It serves multiple purposes: it gets the word out by making a conversation more visible, it engages a wider network of participants in the dialogue, and it shows support for a particular viewpoint. Ghomeshi’s tweet hits the important points – it expresses a negative sentiment for Ford’s actions and drives it home with visual evidence of his non-participation. People who retweeted likely felt that this tweet represented their feelings accurately. It’s also likely that a broader range of people feel comfortable retweeting something fairly political when it’s led by a media personality because they may not be ready to make such strong statements independently.

A couple of the participants in my MSc research who weren’t out to their families talked about this. They explained that they wanted to show support for LGBTQ people and did so through political tweets that didn’t reflect their identity as much as personal statements. It seems that retweeting might be a way for a lot of people to get involved and stand in solidarity with a certain viewpoint without their actions implicating them beyond their capacity. Our personal situations may not always allow all of us to be highly vocal activists, but retweeting could add power to those who do speak up so that they speak on behalf of a collective – a collective of Twitter users, at least.

Personally, I might also guess that users mostly retweeted during this incident because, well, is there really anything left to say about Rob Ford?

————

Notes:

• I’ve added Tableau to my blog’s “Assorted tools” page in case you’d like to have a closer look at it. Their website allows a free trial along with some great video tutorials.
• A good resource for what/why/how to work with Twitter data is the book “Twitter and Society” edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt and Cornelius Puschmann.
• You may have noticed that I’ve been talking about ‘big data’ without heaps of numbers and statistics. While this speaks to my tendency toward qualitative research, it’s also a technique from the digital humanities methods that I’ve been learning about. It’s possible to take large sets of data and do a ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, 2007) of them in their entirety (like Figure 1) and then to drill down into more qualitative types of content analysis. I turned to Richard Rogers’ book “Digital Methods” as inspiration for this.
• Disclaimer: This was just an exercise (with a relatively small number of tweets!) that I’ve presented for discussion – there are of course lots of limitations to ‘big data’ analysis and the use of Twitter data. While I don’t address these here, other people have – start with boyd and Crawford’s “Critical Questions for Big Data” to get a handle on the issues.
• Opinions are my own, as this was cross-posted from stefanieduguay.com

*All of this was done with the gracious help of QUT’s Social Media Research Group, especially with Jean Burgess’ ninja Twitter data collection skills and Darryl Woodford’s crash course on Tableau analysis for Twitter data.

In text references:

boyd, d., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2010.412

Moretti, F. (2007). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.

‘Big Data’

• Jean Burgess: A Decade of ‘Social Media’ and What to Do about It: Methodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference pre-conference on Internet Histories, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess: Easy Data, Hard Data? Twitter Research and the Politics of Data Access, presented at the Compromised Data symposium, Toronto, 28 Oct. 2013.
• Darryl Woodford: Slicing Big Data: Gambling, Twitter & Time Sensitive Information, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Darryl Woodford: Lightning Talk: Social Media Methods & Ethics, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference pre-conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Sky Croeser and Tim Highfield: Mapping Movements: Social Movement Research and Big Data: Critiques and Alternatives, presented at the Compromised Data symposium, Toronto, 29 Oct. 2013.

Crisis Communication

• Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns and Avijit Paul: Cumulative and Comparative Social Media Analytics for Crisis Communication, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns: Social Media Issue Publics in Australia, presented at the IBM Research Colloquium 2013, Melbourne, 12 Nov. 2013.
• Avijit Paul: Extracting Important Information from Social Network Stream during Crisis, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns: Social Media in Times of Crisis: The Australian Perspective, presented at a Project EPIC symposium, Boulder, 23 Oct. 2013.

News and Politics

• Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield and Theresa Sauter: #ausvotes Mark Two: Twitter in the 2013 Australian Federal Election, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 24 Oct. 2013.
• Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns: Exploring Emotions on #auspol: Polarity and Public Performance in the Twitter Debate on Australian Politics, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 26 Oct. 2013.
• Tim Highfield: Appropriating Breaking News? The Evolving Twitter Coverage of the Lance Armstrong Doping Scandal, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns: Twitter and the 2013 Australian Election, presented at Political Imperatives: Media and the 2013 Election Campaign, Brisbane, 27 Sep. 2013.
• Wilfred Wang: Defending Cantonese Weibo and Geo-Identity Politics in Guangzhou China, presented at ‘The Impact of War on Modern Chinese Society’, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 18-19 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns and Theresa Sauter: Anatomie eines Trending Topics: Retweet-Ketten als Verbreitungsmechanismus für aktuelle Ereignisse, presented at the DGPuk Innovative Methods for the Study of Public Communication workshop, Vienna, 8 Nov. 2013.

Popular Culture

• Ana Vimieiro and Renato Vimieiro: Oscar Pistorius and the Death of Reeva Steenkamp: Mapping Public Opinions Using Frame Analysis and Data Mining, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Katrin Weller and Axel Bruns: Friends or Followers: German Soccer Clubs and Their Fans on Twitter, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 25 Oct. 2013.
• Tim Highfield: News via Voldemort: The Role of Parody and Satire in Topical Discussions on Twitter, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns: #Pontiff-Ex: The Twitter Community’s Reaction to the Papal Resignation, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 25 Oct. 2013.

Platforms

• Kim Osman: Wikipedia as a New Media Institution: Issues of Diversity, Regulation and Sustainability in an Open Encyclopaedia, poster presented at WikiSym & OpenSym 2013, Hong Kong, 5-7 Aug. 2013 (paper at QUT ePrints).
• Wilfred Wang: Identity, Locality and Social Media in Guangzhou China, presented at the Fifth Postgraduate Symposium: Identities, Ideas, Ideologies, Griffith University, Brisbane, 1 Nov. 2013.

That should be enough for 2013! See you next year at a conference somewhere…