Bente Kalsnes

When The Truth No Longer Matters: How Social Media’s Engagement Obsession Is Killing Democracy Sensationalism, controversy, and misinformation outperform factual reporting, eroding trust in journalism and deepening societal divisions. Three journalists weigh in.

«These filtering systems, including those used by Facebook, Meta, and Google, effectively delegate our information access to external forces rather than relying on personal critical reasoning. www.forbes.com/sites/hessie...?

Georgia ramps up restrictions on media, NGOs with drastic new laws The fresh restrictions come amid a political crisis over disputed elections and the government’s reversal on its EU membership bid.

Nok et eksempel på at Trump inspirerer andre autoritære leder. www.politico.eu/article/geor...

Should be a very timely topic: Special issue in New Media & Society: A Brave New Democracy. The impact of Social Media, Algorithms and AI on politics & citizenship. Deadline February 5th. heyzine.com/flip-book/ea...

Useful word to understand these days
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy
snl.no/oligarki

Hva er igjen? Titusener av palestinere returnerer nå til ruiner etter 15 måneder med bombing i Gaza. En FN-rapport viser at 69 prosent av bygningene er skadet eller ødelagt. Nye dronebilder viser de enorme ødelegge...

Helt vanvittige bilder fra Gaza www.vg.no/nyheter/i/jQ...

Facebook Shifts Content Moderation to Its Users. Are You Ready? Meta is joining X and YouTube in shifting moderation to users. Are you ready?

“A social media platform’s dream is completely automated moderation that they, one, don’t have to take responsibility for and, two, don’t have to pay anyone for,” said Mr. Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise. “So Community Notes is the absolute dream of these people" www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/t...

Regulation matters

Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content Mark Zuckerberg says company will ‘dramatically reduce censorship’ across Facebook, Instagram and Threads

Zuckerberg will soon "get rid of" fact-checkers across Meta platforms. He massively confuses fact-checking with "censorhip" 👇. Seems Meta will soon become the same cesspool of hate and misinformation as X. Well done Mark - more BlueSky users incoming!

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Human rights in Myanmar Stay up to date on the state of human rights in Myanmar with the latest research, campaigns and education material from Amnesty International.

The key thing to understand about Meta without guard rails is that, when they allowed their platform to exist without any content controls in Myanmar under an extremist leader, it was used to directly enable a genocide. Zuckerberg knows that its level of threat. www.amnesty.org/en/location/...

Iceland says it will put EU membership to referendum by 2027 Iceland has traditionally been ambivalent about joining the bloc but issues like the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and a range of domestic issues has meant the country is slowly warming to the idea of...

Iceland will have an EU referendum by 2027 - exciting news also for Norway. Will it finally start a new EU debate in Norway? www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

Citizen-produced political text: An interdisciplinary study of ineq... Research possibilities utilising text data are expanding (Baden et al., 2022), and political text produced by citizens is among the most commonly employed text data within political and communicati...

What are the main challenges for the researchers studying citizen-produced political text? Data collection difficulties, steep learning curve, and more.
Read more in our piece with a wonderful OPTED team of Amanda Haraldsson, @michelesdv.bsky.social, @benteka.bsky.social, and Karolina Koc-Michalska.

Musk Expresses Support for Far-Right Party in Germany’s Election It was not the first online intervention by Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and adviser to Donald Trump, on behalf of once-fringe anti-immigrant parties in Europe.

Now this. Other European politicians he has shown support for are Farage, Salvini.

Best Of: Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe Podcast Episode · The Ezra Klein Show · 06/12/2024 · 1h 31m

Always interesting to listen to Pippa Norris (and Ezra Klein). Here, a very intersting episode about why the far right is thriving in so many countries. podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/t...

NordMedia 25: Call for Submissions - NordMedia Network NordMedia 2025 invites submissions of papers, panels, and workshops engaging with the conference theme, Imagining Livable Futures. While we encourage participants to address the theme thoughtfully, cr...

NordMedia's Call for Submissions in now open! Odense August 13.-15.
nordmedianetwork.org/latest/news/...
Deadline for all submission types and abstracts is February 28th.
I would be extra glad if you would consider submitting something to the PolCom division (9)
nordmedianetwork.org/nordmedia-co...

Meta and Google so far have basically held a duopoly on social media political advertising. This is bound to become a monopoly once Google has stopped carrying political ads (at least officially, we know that political ads still occur on platforms where they are banned).

Graph from my dissertation.

Bluesky is emerging as the new platform for science - Mike Young Academy Scientific Twitter is about to find its true successor. And it is not X. This, our latest release, shows that the Bluesky network of scientists is growing — and growing.

A mapping of how Bluesky is becoming the new Scientific Twitter

mikeyoungacademy.dk/bluesky-is-e...

Very very honestly, the best thing that ever happened for Bluesky was that Jack Dorsey quit in a huff and took his increasingly weird, faux-democratic worldview with him. 🚮

This platform's gone from strength to strength since his dark shadow lifted. 🌞

This chart is pretty insane. More of an overnight social/political-type shift than typical tech adoption imo: techcrunch.com/2024/11/19/b...

European Parliament will use TikTok for EU electoral campaign despite ban www.euractiv.com/section/poli...

Media law reform poses major test for Tusk as PiS fights back euobserver.com/rule-of-law/...

Press corner Highlights, press releases and speeches

EU Commission launches investigation of X, also for lack of researcher data access:

"The investigation concerns suspected shortcomings in giving researchers access to X's publicly accessible data as mandated by Article 40 of the DSA, as well as shortcomings in X's ads repository."

rb.gy/itv4s5

This is a topic we have been working on since 2020 in the SCAM project (Source Criticism and Mediated Disinformation), read more here: uni.oslomet.no/scam/

(Cont.) The contradictions between established routines in the newsroom and the demand for renewal of journalistic methods can be sorted under two themes: strategy vs. practice and proximity vs. distance to the field and sources.

(Cont.)We investigated this in three Norwegian newsrooms in connection with the 2021 election and our findings show a discrepancy between the alleged potential of the new technologies and the everyday practice of newswork and fact-checking – also in the digitally advanced Norwegian media industry.

New article from Reidun J. Samuelsen, me and Steen Steensen on journalism, disinformation and fact-checking. How do journalists check digital information?
Read the full article in Journalism Practice, the article is openly available here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

«A map by the United Nations' humanitarian affairs office, relying on the health ministry's data, shows that more than 3,600 people — roughly one-third of the total — were killed in areas where Israel has told civilians in northern Gaza to escape to.»

Apple suspends all advertising on X/Twitter, joining IBM, Lionsgate and the European Commission

Yes, it is here! Looking forward to read, @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social, Daniel and Bruce!

Should the media tell you when they use AI to report the news? What consumers should know Media companies should set up guidelines for how they are using AI.

To be transparent or not:

A.I. Muddies Israel-Hamas War in Unexpected Way Fakes related to the conflict have been limited and largely unconvincing, but their presence has people doubting real evidence.

«Deepfake detection tools, he said, “provide a false solution to a much more complex and difficult-to-solve problem.” www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/b...