[Air-L] Announcing the #AoIR2024 Student Paper Award

[Michelle, Association of Internet Researchers]

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.
<https://www.conftool.org/aoir2024/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=434&presentations=show>

*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.
<https://www.conftool.org/aoir2024/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=399&presentations=show>

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