We are delighted to announce two joint winners for this year’s Student Paper Award: Yarden Skop (University of Siegen, Germany) and Anna Schjøtt Hansen (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for their paper, How Fact-Checkers are Becoming Machine Learners: A Case of Meta’s Third Party Programme, and Guanqin He (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and Yijia Zhang (University of British Columbia, Canada) for their paper, Beyond Platform Control: Gendered Frictions in Food Delivery Work.
Yarden Skop and Anna Schjøtt Hansen’s paper expertly explores recent shifts in political fact-checking, showcasing the shift towards fact-checking as a “sociotechnical phenomenon” combining human workers and machine learning systems, highlighting profound implications for journalists and journalism, and politics and democracies. The paper showcases rigorous research with hard-to-reach populations, combining semi-structured interviews with fact checkers and observational data from an ethnographic enquiry. During our nomination process, we couldn’t help but draw connections between this paper and the work of AoIR Vice President, Professor Sarah T. Roberts, which showcases the hidden realities of human content moderators. Skop and Hansen’s paper likewise, and as one of our reviewers put it, “makes visible the opaque labour conditions and sociotechnical assemblages within the 3PFC program”. The award-winning paper makes a unique and vital contribution to internet research, carries strong potential for wider social impact, and would certainly attract public interest in addition to that of the AoIR audience. You will be able to hear this paper being presented at 11am on Thursday, 31 October.
Guanqin He and Yijia Zhang’s paper offers a timely and invaluable response to the conference’s consideration of ‘industry’, building upon the growing body of research into labour and the gig economy to highlight how previously-identified strategies of resistance and collaboration are not universally available. The authors use the conceptual framework of frictions to highlight controls facing women working as food delivery workers in China, within the platform and its labour context but also externally and structurally, and how these serve to marginalise and exclude them. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork and interviews with food delivery riders, the paper stands out for its reflections on both gender and labour within the platform economy, with the paper’s reviewers highlighting the insights from a participant population that is both under-represented and hard to recruit. The paper provides findings and considerations that are important additions to our understanding of digital labour and the gig economy, and which push to advance the scope of research in this field. You will be able to hear this paper being presented at 13:30 on Thursday, 31 October.
As well as these two winners, a special mention goes to those on our shortlist (alphabetically by surname):
- Alexandria Arrieta: “The Limits of Virality: Music Creators and Platform Negotiation in Later Stage TikTok”.
- Annina Claesson: “Influencer Creep in Parliament: Platform Pressures in the Visibility Labour of French MPs”.
- Rohan Grover: “Unpacking Expertise in the Privacy Tech Industry”.
- Deanna Holroyd: “Content Creators vs The Healthcare Industry: A Case Study of the Techno-Cultural Authority of ADHD TikTok”.
We extend tremendous congratulations to the authors and look forward to hearing their presentations at #AoIR2024!
The AoIR 2024 Conference Committee
