Speaker : Professor Robert Ackland, VOSON Lab & School of Sociology, Australian National University
Title : Deliberation and Influence on Social Media: Insights from Network Analysis
Abstract : Social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit provide cititzens with the opportunity to develop political opinions via accessing new information and engaging in discussion about issues. However, the early optimism about the role of social media in enhancing democracy has in recent years faced headwinds of concern relating to the potential impact of influence campaigns via misinformation, social media bots and other coordinated activities. In this presentation I outline two recent projects where network analysis is used to gain insight into political behaviour on social media. In the first study, I explore how the dynamics and structure of threaded conversation networks on Reddit provide insight into whether political deliberation may be occurring. In the second study, I use semantic network analysis of Twitter data to examine the existence and impact of Russian Internet Research Agency activity in the Australian political Twittersphere in 2015-16.
Speaker Bio : Professor Robert Ackland leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab (http://vosonlab.net), which is based in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. His research and teaching is in the areas of computational social science, social network analysis, and the social science of the Internet.