Opening keynote: Deliberation and Influence on Social Media

Rob Ackland presented the opening keynote "Deliberation and Influence on Social Media: Insights from Network Analysis" on the online workshop "Practical Applications of Network Science 2021", organised by RMIT, and held on Feb. 22-23, 2021.

The keynote talk addressed two recent projects where network analysis is used to gain insight into political behaviour on social media.

The first study explores the dynamics and structure of threaded conversation networks on Reddit and whether political deliberation may be occurring. The second study implements 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.

The online workshop explored the theory and practical applications of network science in different fields such as, the study of proteins in biology, finding unusual patterns in social networks, optimisation of transportation networks and the study of complex computer networks use the theories and algorithms in Network Science.