Trust in the system: an introduction to the #AoIR2019 special issue

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Information, Communication and Society reflects on the generative work presented at the 2019 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (#AoIR2019). The conference attracted approximately 380 people from 35 countries to work through the theme, Trust in the System. Delegates analysed developments on the internet, in social media and through data management, including those grounded in Indigenous perspectives and varied communities, resiliencies and collective voices. Plenary provocations prompted discussions about our various relationships with “trust”, “system” and “the”, while research sites included webtoons and webnovels, fans and games, chemsex and porn, the rise of digital assistants and evolving digital practices in politics, health, education, environment and the media. Creative industries, automation and platformization figured broadly. Ethics, methods and theory ranged from science and technology studies (STS) to queer and indigenous theory to algorithmic approaches, digital ethnography, creative methods, and emergent work in bot detection across social media. The resulting articles curated for this collection are offered by emerging to established scholars, from around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• internet studies
• association of internet researchers
• data
• surveillance
• fake news

The annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) formally opened on 2 October 2019, with a warm and lively ‘welcome to country’ by Shannon Ruska from Tribal Experiences, member of the Yuggera, Turrbal, Nunukul, Gorenpul/Cooperoo and Yugembir communities. In delivering a Tribal Blessing Song for Maiwair/Warrar (Brisbane River Area), Shannon’s focus is to provide

The Education Process of a Welcome to Country, why it is an important Tribal process and now as adopted Australian Protocol in the Modern Day, localized stories of family/tribe & culture on the Brisbane River, Clan boundaries and Neighbouring Tribes (Ruska, 2019).

Conference chair (and co-guest editor of this issue), Jonathon Hutchison, hosted the evening’s event, inviting participants to take advantage of Brisbane’s attractions and the many brilliant papers on offer at the conference. This was accompanied by a welcome from AoIR president, Axel Bruns, who also recognized past presidents and the many volunteers and staff who make AoIR happen every year.

Keynote speaker, sociologist Bronwyn Carlson, from Dharawal Country, offered a generous, comprehensive talk that made clear the complexities of the many relationships among indigenous people to the internet. Her talk presented several examples of social uses of the internet that could have led to the conclusion that indigenous people ought not to ‘trust the system.’ Nonetheless, Dr. Carlson’s palpable optimism and careful analysis drew the audience into more complex understandings of how the active involvement of indigenous scholars, creative workers and citizens today does much to re-embody ourselves responsibly in the world. Carlson is one of several powerful scholars in the field (e.g., Kim Tallbear; Jennifer Wemigwans; Zoë Todd; Jason Lewis; Ellie Rennie; Tanja Dreher) bridging indigenous approaches within internet and social media communication research. The session echoed last year’s keynote in Montreal, Canada, offered by science and technology studies (STS) scholar Jason Lewis (Harvey & Luka, 2019), grounding each conference in indigenous research and protocols, and recognizing that many of us are settlers in lands that have been stewarded by thousands of indigenous people for thousands of years. What became obvious during Carlson’s keynote are the many reasons indigenous people embody contemporary social media practices. Community, resilience, collective voice, and strength are some ways in which Australian Indigenous people are pushing back against the oppression of right wing Australia.

The annual conference attracted approximately 380 people from 35 countries, with subject matter ranging just as widely. Delegates analysed the latest and long-standing developments on the internet and in social media, including webtoons and webnovels, fans and games, chemsex and porn, the rise of digital assistants and the evolving mobilization of the digital in politics, health, education, environment and the media. Creative industries, automation and platformization figured broadly in the discussions. Ethics, methods and theory ranged just as widely, from long-standing science and technology studies (STS) to queer and indigenous theory to well-established algorithmic approaches, digital ethnography, creative methods, and emergent work in bot detection across social media–all enthused the delegates.

The main plenary for AoIR 2019 anchored several other discussion threads throughout the conference by ‘unpacking trust in the system.’ Jean Burgess from host university, Queensland University of Technology, moderated the conversation, including challenging the audience to think about the conference as an opportunity to parse the thematic keywords quite thoroughly. Professor Burgess asked what ‘Trust,’ ‘System,’ and ‘The’ could mean in the current research among internet scholars. The four panelists for the plenary, Yik Chan Chin (Assistant professor, Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Aim Sinpeng, (Lecturer in Government and International Relations, University of Sydney), Ivana Jurko (Research and Development Manager of Humanitech, Australian Red Cross), and Mark Andrejevic (Professor of Media Studies, Monash University), raised several questions that bridged the academic and professional spheres, and which echoed throughout the conference. Chin launched the discussion with a focus on governance in the news media, social media and the internet, and indeed, on all contemporary forms of communications and interaction. Dr. Chin explored various reasons for the rise of distrust in news media and other forms of information sharing, particularly including social media. Key issues include sensationalism, news bias, and the inability for viewers and users to separate opinion from fact – or what some have called the ‘breaking of the public’s trust.’ Additionally, exclusions still matter enormously: whose stories, and whose news, are being reported, and by whom. Chin called for a code of practice in the news reporting field, especially in social media. She noted that media takedowns as a practice had become a hot topic and the subject of non-binding agreements between social media organizations and various nation-state governments in the previous several months, providing the sequence of events following the mass murders in Christchurch, New Zealand (Graham-McLay, 2020) as an example. Chin suggested that we draw on past journalism standards for fact-checking and the validation of trustworthy content as exemplars that could inform and professionalize the approaches of social media companies today for the advancement of civic behaviour online.

Originally from Thailand, Dr. Aim Sinpeng (Sinpeng, 2019) introduced concerns about trust as constituted by the environment within which you operate, the difficulty of measuring trust, and the influence of family and friends through social media, for example, in voting decisions. Sinpeng talked about her young nephew growing up consuming military-sanctioned content on all forms of media in Thailand, and how, by the age of five, was capably endorsing and singing back propagandistic military songs (with lyrics such as ‘if you give us trust, we will give you democracy’). As Sinpeng pointed out, if you are in an authoritarian context (for example, in southeast Asia, including Singapore, with a strong state-run press), you will tend to think that propaganda is trustworthy. Sinpeng argued that the particulars of each civic system continue to need to be examined closely, country by country, over time. For example, she noted, Malaysia suffered from a longstanding lack of trust in government, but when a strong opposition ran in recent elections, there was the highest increase in trust in a year that had been seen in a very long time (Barron, 2018). Several subsequent conference papers examining the state of journalism and politics in the United States and elsewhere also reinforced this message, further complicating what is meant by trust, authoritarianism and populism, depending on where you are in the world.

Moreover, Dr. Sinpeng noted that at least some internet-based and other 2019 indices for measuring trust indicate a widening trust inequality gap. However, as much of this research is predicated on an assumption that the size and demographic makeup of the ‘informed public’ (i.e., people with college education, income in the top 25%, and those who regularly read or consume news) is consistent across nations, such indices are often inaccurate in developing countries. For example, in Myanmar, the demographic assumptions do not fit the circumstances, and, to complicate things further, surveys are not usually well-translated or conducted, nor do questions about trust include references to local conditions or national media and news reporting structures. Lastly, in locations where there may not be widespread options for news reporting, Dr. Sinpeng noted there is a correlation between trust in social media, and how similarly people vote with their families. For example, in the Philippines, individuals used Facebook to figure out who their families are voting for. It wasn’t that they trusted social media per se, but that they trusted their families’ good judgment.

Ivana Jurko, Research and Development Manager of Humanitech, run by the Australian Red Cross, noted that the Red Cross counts on maintaining trust in the humanitarian sector – with 400 sites across Australia alone, and thousands more in 191 countries around the world. The Red Cross commitment to support people at times of vulnerability is increasingly reliant on data and tech-driven transformation, which provides some solutions but also challenges. For example, ‘frontier-technologies’ such as data modelling and biometrics help some agencies to process registrations and thereby realize faster access to aid. Filtering social media messages can help responders on the ground to improve the speed, efficiency, and transparency of humanitarian organizations, which increases trust. However, while data and technology can enable humanitarian organizations to work cheaper and faster in some ways, they also introduce a host of potential harms, by exposing vulnerable people to new forms of intrusion, privacy violations, and testing unproven technologies without meaningful consent (such as biometric procedures). Questions raised by Jurko echoed throughout the conference’s many discussions of contemporary ethics practices, including where and how long data will be stored, who has access to it, and increased exposures to surveillance. Jurko recognized AoIR for establishing a code of ethics, and noted the need for such standards to be developed in the humanitarian aid field, perhaps through partnerships among scholars, non-governmental organizations such as Humanitech at the Red Cross and the private sector.

Finally, Professor Mark Andrejevic reminded conference goers about the power of storytelling, and the relationship between trust, speaking and storytelling. He also pointed to early discussions about the Internet and how it was imagined to be an amplifier and facilitator of ways to ‘speak back to institutionalized power.’ Professor Andrejevic rhetorically asked the audience about how that had played out. At the very moment that a broader array of voices gained access to this form of communication, claims were made that we could dispense with/dismiss the role of storytelling, voice, for example, as suggested in Chris Anderson’s infamous ‘End of Theory’ claims in Wired Magazine (2008). At the time, Andrejevic noted, it was thought that stories did not matter, and that only data matters. The race to build data collection and mining capacities had very little to do with speech, or stories, by turning all speech into metadata rather than conversation. Rather than dispensing with language, however, it turns out that narrative is a vital community resource (e.g., Foreman-Wernet & Dervin, 2017), which is why it can be threatening to systems of power. The push to eliminate language is connected with ‘a series of apparatuses arrayed towards undermining trust … [because] mobilizing forms of mistrust is a business model that predates the internet even while it is exacerbated by it.’ Professor Andrejevic wrapped up by suggesting that the proliferation of surveillance illustrates this, and challenging the audience to think about what surrogates there are for trust in society.¹

The theme of Trust in the System emerged in a critical time of internet studies as issues such as misinformation, increased surveillance, and user deception gained interest within our societies. Our online environments are increasingly built on commercially oriented platforms, we produce data and have data produced about us at alarming rates, content published on digital spaces can be questionable at times, and often problematic government intervention all contribute to one of the most critical issues of our time. Simultaneously, trust is a key techno-emotion that helps us to define our environments (Svedmark, 2016), suggesting that the data we produce is deeply personal and intimate. If we are to operate in such circumstances, that is to create intimate data which is at the whim of commercially operated platforms, to what extent does trust come into play? How might we contribute to the development of the concept of trust within our contemporary media and communication environments? What role might authenticity play on the relationships we develop in these spaces? All of these issues, amongst others, were identified in the development of the conference theme, which saw a large group of internet research oriented scholars respond to Trust in the System. In this issue, we pick up on a number of the themes raised in the keynote and plenaries, as well as by the conference committee.

We begin this issue by examining trust within artificial intelligence (AI) as a growing concern within media studies, internet research and science and technology studies (STS), particularly as automatic systems are of increasing use within society. Henriksen and Bechmann (2020) focus on the idea of doable AI, by building on the work of Fujimura (1987), to describe a world that fits into algorithms and AI, instead of attempting to fit the world into algorithms. They approach this idea through the lens of health management, and present research findings from an extended participant observation project of a R&D project within an AI company. One of the key findings they observe are the significance of labels as a means to align the construction of the world into algorithmically designed systems.

An integrated but large part of the work with defining labels and selecting the relevant data is to strike the right balance between contextualization and generalization in order to provide truth that is valid in one single case and yet applies to many cases (p. 15).

Steedman et al. (2020) turn the spotlight of trust toward data-driven practices, particularly those within institutional settings. These scholars build on the existing literature around trust broadly defined, and expertly maneuver toward the most recent scholarship on trust within data and data systems. They draw on empirical focus group research to demonstrate the range of complexity of not only ‘trust’ but also how this plays out within personal data that is being gathered by institutions. They focus on the BBC as one of those such institutions quoted as being ‘trustworthy’, but also have a somewhat different public perspective of what trustworthy means. ‘Complex ecologies of trust, we suggest, take account of the multiple factors that engender, maintain or undermine trust in data-driven systems, including experience, perception, understanding and feelings as they relate to organisations, services, people and practices’ (p. 16).

The article by Shim et al. (2020) turns to the concept of trust within the emerging Asian digital media space by paying particular attention to the production of webtoons from South Korea and webnovels from Mainland China. They articulate the publication process of these two burgeoning media forms as a cultural intermediation (Bourdieu, 1984) process: one that is built on the trust of others to increase the capital value of these cultural artefacts. By tracing the production process from original creator, through fan contribution, to major media production through the lens of a more contemporary understanding of the value-adding capacity of cultural intermediation (Hutchinson, 2017; Smith Maguire & Matthews, 2010). These scholars make a compelling argument for the interconnection of trust within cultural intermediation across the internet production, publication and distribution technologies as a contributing factor to webtoons and webnovels, as two significant forms within the cross-regional Asian digital media market.

Representing so much of the wonderful work coming from our emerging scholars, Kwanda and Lin (2020) present work on fake news and journalist practices in an Indonesian setting, a clearly understudied environment. They initially examined the response to two fake news stories that followed the Palu earthquake and tsunami in 2019, by examining how–and on what timeline–three national media outlets took up the story, with more conservative outlets seeking confirmation from official government sources rather than other experts. Even more interestingly, this modest sampling led them to conduct a series of interviews with newsroom professionals, based on the hierarchy-of-influence model, to better understand how trust worked in the post-disaster phase of news reporting in Indonesia. Their article focuses on the contradictions revealed between professional values (shaped by Western training) and practices (influenced by social values) at the individual, everyday (‘routine’) and organizational levels, setting the stage for further investigation in this arena.

Giglietto et al. (2020) also examine the role that fake news and misinformation play within the Italian political election of 2018, and the 2019 European election. They mobilize the frame of ‘media manipulation’ as a way to think about the European media ecosystem to examine a combination of Facebook data and two datasets of Italian political news stories. Giglietto et al analyse the circulation of specific news articles presented as political versus entertainment items, finding that

the proportion of inauthentic entities in a network affects the wideness of the range of news media sources they shared, thus pointing to different strategies and possible motivations … employed by networks of actors willing to manipulate the media and public opinion.

They present their method as a way of detecting how that deception can be seen to be quite co-ordinated.

Turning the spotlight to another significant digital media player within the Southeast Asian region, Cabalquinto and Soriano (2020) have provided a unique take on the Philippines. Through the concept of ‘sisterhood’ (Roces, 2003), these scholars highlight how female sociality operates as a form of solidarity between Filipino women. In focussing on the case study of one leading female Filipino YouTuber, these scholars highlight the conversations that emerge around interacial relationships. By engaging online sisterhood as a cultural practice, Cabalquinto and Soriano question the role post-colonialism plays on the stereotypical representations of Filipino women on digitally networked spaces and video sharing platforms.

The article by Wright et al. (2020) continues to nuance examinations of gender relations by using online conversation and moderation within the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) forum to highlight the contradictions in communication approaches of the Manosphere arena. By using the Freelon (2015) approach towards online community discussion activity, these scholars draw on a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology to highlight how the seemingly ‘liberal’ definition that the space promotes, is actually more of a communicative arrangement. They demonstrate this clearly articulated observation by using their analysis to show that a collective approach toward a broad range of topics, from cars through to female editorial teams at the Huffington Post, indeed bring them together through a number of measures. The combination of strong community-developing techniques, alongside significantly disturbing e-bile and vitriol, shores up their call for further research on this under-explored area.

We would like to thank all the authors for their fine work, and for staying on track in the short five months that followed the conference, despite a global pandemic and many other localized and international disruptions. We are also grateful to our reviewers, who responded with generosity and thoughtfulness to the authors, often on tight timelines. The team at the journal, particularly editor Sarah Shrive-Morrison, were guiding lights during this intense period. Finally, we would like to thank the Association of Internet Researchers for providing us with the opportunity to bring together and share this work with the scholarly community so soon after the conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr Mary Elizabeth Luka (ME) is Assistant Professor of Arts & Media Management at the Department of Arts, Culture & Media (UTSC) with a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research examines co-creative and collaborative production, distribution and dissemination in the arts, social enterprises, broadcasting and telecommunications, and creative management policy, planning and practice. Luka is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled A(rtSpots) to Z(eD): digitizing arts documentary in Canada. Her work has been published in numerous journals and books, including Information, Communication and Society, Canadian Journal of Communication, Topia, Public, and Social Media & Society.

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney. His research explores Public Service Media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated media, and algorithms in media. He is the Treasurer on the Executive Committee for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the Secretary for the International Public Service Media Association, RIPE, and was recently the Program Chair for the 2019 Association of Internet Research (AoIR) conference.

Notes

1 Recordings of the keynote and plenary can be found here: https://aoir.org/aoir2019/aoir2019program/