You are here : Home > Research > Teams and structures
  • Research,

‘Post moderators on French information websites’, seminar organised by IDETCOM

on the April 5, 2019

14h-16h
Seminar hall - Arsenal library [level -1]

fourth session of the ‘Digital comments and organisations (COMUИ)’ seminar organised by Lucien Rapp, IDETCOM Director and professor, and Laurence Leveneur, lecturer at IDETCOM.

This session of the COMUИ seminar will welcome Brigitte Sebbah and Nikos Smyrnaios from LERASS (Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherches Appliquées en Sciences Sociales- EA 827). They will present the results of two surveys carried out among moderators of French news websites. The session will be broken into two parts.

Firstly, Nikos Smyrnaios will explain how he studied the reasoning that governs the economic, technical and editorial operations of content moderation. His original research combined two components: a study using interviews and observations between February and March 2016 with one of French media’s three main moderator service providers, and a semi-automated comparative analysis of a sample of published and unpublished messages from three news sites relating to the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. This research looks at the work of post moderators, who form part of broader socio-economic context and are reliant on a set of legal, technical and industrial restrictions in relation to the quality and plurality of information that is made publicly available on the Internet.

Continuing on, Brigitte Sebbah will present research done with Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel (Neuchâtel University, Media and Journalism Academy), which focused on live-blogging and the characters created jointly by the news articles and the participating public in the lemonde.fr new coverage of the scandal involving Dominique Strauss Kahn.
Firstly, an analyses was performed on a body of text contained in two documents, which were the live stream and all messages submitted by Internet users, of which only a minuscule amount was published (1%). The comparative analysis of the two sides of this participation and the meta-descriptive elements of the live-blogging resulted in an analysis of how professional reporters used the ordinary words of Internet users. It examined: 1) the moderator/filter action performed by journalists and the projection of an archetypal Internet user and 2) the emergence of a joint declarative position among Internet users – an assumed ‘general public’ for live streaming. In a second study, the researchers checked their findings against a lexicometric analysis of a large volume of data to test their new hypotheses about public participation and the media’s framing of the event.

The session is open to the public but requires prior registration. To register, please write to: seminairecomun@gmail.com

The speakers:

Nikos Smyrnaios, lecturer in information and communication sciences, Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherches Appliquées en Sciences Sociales, IUT ‘A’ (Castres site), Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier University
Selected publications:
• Smyrnaios N., 2017, ‘Les GAFAM contre l’internet. Une économie politique du numérique’ [GAFAM against the Internet: a political economy of the digital world], INA éditions, Bry-sur-Marne.
• Smyrnaios N., Marty E., 2017, ‘Profession “nettoyeur du net”. De la modération des commentaires sur les sites d’information français’ [‘Net-cleaner’: post moderators on French news websites], Réseaux, vol. 205, no. 5, p. 57-90.
• Smyrnaios N., Ratinaud P., 2017, ‘The Charlie Hebdo Attacks on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of a Political Controversy in English and French’, Social Media+ Society, Vol 3, Issue 1, February (online).

Brigitte Sebbah, lecturer in information and communication sciences, Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier University - IUT ‘A’ (Ponsan site)
Toulouse. Researcher at LERASS (Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherches Appliquées en Sciences Sociales- EA 827). http://beforeclass.eu/ @brigittesebbah

Selected publications:

• Marty, Pignard-Cheynel, Sebbah (2016), ‘Internet users’ participation and news framing: focus on the Strauss Kahn case-related Live Blog at Le Monde.fr’ Revue New Media and Society.
• Sebbah B. & Pignard-Cheynel N. (2015). ‘Le live-blogging : les figures co-construites de l’information et du public participant. La couverture de l’affaire DSK par lemonde.fr.’ [Live-blogging: the characters jointly constructed by reporters and the public. Coverage of the DSK scandal by lemonde.fr], Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo [online], Vol 4, n°2 - 2015, uploaded on 15 November 2015. URL: http://surlejournalisme.com/rev
• Sebbah B., Mercier A., Badouard R. (2018), ‘La fabrique des tweets polémiques’ [The creation of controversial tweets], in #info, partager et commenter l'actualité sur Twitter et Facebook’; Presses MSH Paris.
• Sebbah B. & Pignard-Cheynel N. (2014). ‘Le live, expression d’une information "en train de se faire”. L’exemple de la couverture de l’affaire DSK par lemonde.fr’ [Live-blogging: news as it happens. An example from coverage of the DSK scandal by lemonde.fr], Recherches en communication, no. 40, pp.13-25.
• Sebbah B. & Pignard-Cheynel N. (2013). ‘L’identité des journalistes du web à travers des “récits de soi”’ [The identity of Internet journalists through self-narratives]. Communication, 32/2, URL: http://communication.revues.org/5045
Updated on July 16, 2019