Politics

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

Day two at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with another ‘fake news’ panel, and the first presenter is Seong Choul Hong. His focus is on the continuing controversy over global warming, which remains a target for mis- and disinformation. Even Donald Trump has described climate change as a ‘hoax’ in the past. The present project is interested in the third-person effect of such controversies. This effect appears to be stronger in countries with less content regulation, incidentally.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Asta Zelenkauskaite, whose interest is in micro- as well as macro-perspectives on influence in online contexts. This understands influence as non-linear and context-dependent, mediated by available media and information infrastructures and their affordances.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

The next speakers at IAMCR 2019 are Thomas Eckerl and Oliver Hahn, whose interest is in the role of Instagram in political communication in Germany. The adoption of such platforms for political communication is an example of growing mediatisation in society as such, and in politics in particular, as well as a sign of the continuing shift towards more participatory media forms and from top-down to bottom-up communication over the past two decades or so.