Category: General

Creating Heuristics to Identify Echo Chambers in Political Discussions on Twitter is part of one research stream of the 3B project. It is aimed to develop automated tools to map information environment ‘health’, through transparent and objective indicators addressing, for example, diversity of perspectives; openness to opposing views; and the extent to which debates informed by reliable sources. The research was presented by Robert Ackland (Australian National University) at Sunbelt 2023 -- The International Network for Social Network Analysis Conference (online) and at the International Sociological Association World Congress in Melbourne, Australia; both presentations took place on 29 June 2023.…

The 8th Biennial Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated (ACSPRI) Social Science Methodology Conference was held on 23-24 November, 2022 (online), providing an opportunity for multidisciplinary researchers to discuss current challenges around social science methodologies. Under the stream 'Research technology and tools', Rob Ackland presented 'Characterising Political Discussion Networks on Twitter', joint work with colleagues from Bielefeld University and Zeppelin University. The presentation provided an overview of a Twitter conversation data collection and sampling approach, and outlined some preliminary findings regarding the deliberative nature of Twitter activity during the first 2020 US presidential debate, constructing a measure of…

The 41st Congress of the German Sociological Association was held at Bielefeld University, between September 26 and 30 under the guiding theme „polarized worlds“. The B3-project was represented by three presentations of its members in two different panels. In his talk, „Methods for Analyzing Conflict in Threaded Online Conversations: The first presidential debate of the 2020 US election on Twitter“, Felix Gumbert highlighted shortcomings of current empirical research on Twitter regarding segregation and political polarization. Prominent approaches mostly rely on hashtag or keyword-based samples, which leaves a fundamental aspect of social media unattended: the possibility for users to interact reciprocally,…

At the upcoming 41. Congress of the German Sociology Association that will take place September 26-30, 2022 in Bielefeld, members of the B3-consortium organized the ad-hoc group „Interdisciplinary exploration of technically assisted (de)polarization“ . It features five presentations by team members and affiliates. Marcel Schliebs (University of Oxford): "From Troll-Farms to Cyber-Brigading: Evolution in the Modus Operandi of State-Backed Information Operations". Lucas Maximilian Schubert (Bundeswehr University Munich): "Doors of Perception - Rethinking the Theoretic Approach to Understand Cyber Affairs in International Relations". Felix Gumbert, Matthias Orlikowski, Ole Pütz (Bielefeld University), Robert Ackland, Bryan Gertzel (Australian National University): "Methods for Analysing…

VOSON Lab researchers and affiliates presented 3B project-related research at the XLII Social Networks Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) #Sunbelt2022, which took place on July 12-16, 2022, in Cairns, Australia.  Prof Robert Ackland presented ‘Threaded Conversation Networks and Political Deliberation on Twitter During the First 2020 US Presidential Election Debate', joint work with Ole Pütz; Bryan Gertzel; Indra Bock; Felix Gumbert; Florian Muhle and Matthias Orlikowski. The presentation focused on the results of a large-scale Twitter data collection, and on approaches used to identify discussion and deliberation on twitter conversations.   A/Prof Mathieu O'Neil presented…

We are currently conducting our next experiment to investigate how people perceive and rate Twitter accounts and are still looking for test participants. If you are interested (and would like to take the opportunity to win a 25€ voucher), please follow this link: https://fh-bielefeld.limequery.com/225822?lang=de-informal. Participation takes around 10-15 minutes (please note that German language skills are required).

In which way does different behavior of bots influence their detection by the popular Twitter bot detection framework Botometer? This question was addressed in a Master‘s thesis written at Bielefeld University by Merle Reimann. Botometer gives the analyzed accounts a score between 0 and 1 (on the website 0-5) where 0 stands for a human and 1 for a bot account. In the beginning of September, Botometer was updated. The update introduced a new model, to improve the bot detection. Botometer now computes the score based on the probability that an account belongs to a certain type of bot class…