Social Media

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides:

The second day at Future of Journalism 2023 conference in Cardiff begins with a pre-recorded keynote by my former QUT colleague John Hartley, and John is also standing by for the Q&A later. He begins with the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia in 1935 – after whom a memorial travelling scholarship at the University of Wales is named.

Is Jones the ideal type of the fearless truth warrior in journalism, though, or a pawn in the Great Game of imperialist powers? The existence of a scholarship and the rhetoric around it suggests the former; he was seen as a passionate seeker of the truth in foreign lands, who took risks under difficult circumstances to uncover atrocities, and there are various books, films, and TV series about his exploits. His father was a headmaster in Barry, Wales, while his mother spent time in the late 1800s as a tutor in Hughesovka or Yuzovka, now part of Donetsk, Ukraine.

The final session on this first day of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference begins with Jaume Suau, whose interest is in the role of news organisations in the spread of mis- and disinformation. What is the impact of disinformation, and how might we study it? Jaume is focussing here first on foreign-sponsored disinformation, whose main objective is to diminish societal trust and increase polarisation; Howe can we assess whether these campaigns have been successful?

The second presenter in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Svenja Boberg. She begins by noting that crisis reporting seems to be the new normal in journalistic reporting of the current permacrisis, from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war and beyond. But journalism is not necessarily prepared for this, and the quality of its reporting especially on war crimes and other critical matters is sometimes problematic and insufficiently thought-through.

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to content forms and formats, to audience and engagement, and other aspects.

But there was a lack of a critical stance – while researchers lamented journalism’s difficulty in adapting to the new Internet technologies now available, a critical stance towards the impact of these technologies on journalism was often missing. This applies for instance to the mental health consequences for journalists of the competitive metrification of journalism engagement measures via social media metrics, or of the increasing targetting of journalists representing minorities with abuse on social media. Journalism research instead adopted the discourse of platform companies, without questioning its biases.

The next speaker in this fast-paced final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Iuliana Calin, whose interest is in the susceptibility to disinformation. What is new about this today, given the long history of mis- and disinformation throughout history? Iuliana particularly notes the impact of AI and algorithms, of emotions, and of cognitive biases, and aims to build a psycho-social profile of the people most susceptible to disinformation, in order to develop communication strategies to address them.

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Karolína Bieliková, whose interest is in the resilience to disinformation on social networking sites amongst active users. How can such resilience be improved? Karolína’s research takes an individual-centric view, exploring users’ strategies for building their resilience.