Journalism

And we conclude the COMNEWS 2023 conference with another set of keynotes, starting with a remote presentation by Verica Rupar on journalism, search engines, and the public interest. She begins by noting the considerable transformations driven by digital technologies over the past years, not least in journalism, since the emergence of the World Wide Web itself; this was first seen as providing a greater platform for non-elite participants, with search engines also offering more access to such a more diverse range of voices.

And the final presenter in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Fransiscus Xaverius Lilik Dwi Mardjianto, exploring journalistic roles in fact-checking in Indonesia. There is considerable social media use in Indonesia, especially via mobile phones, and a concentrated media market that is closely aligned within political interests; WhatsApp and Facebook are used to disseminate political content, and a considerable part of this can be mis- and disinformation, biased, or propaganda. This has also resulted in a low level (39%) of trust in the news media.

The next speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Claudia Severesia, whose focus is on the 2024 elections in Indonesia (for the president and parliament in February, and for governors and local assemblies in November). This will see increasing participation from younger generations (including millennials and Generation Z voters), and political parties will need to find ways of addressing these groups.

The third speaker in this session at COMNEWS 2023 is Olivia Lewi Pramesti, whose interest is in hoaxes ahead of the 2024 Indonesian election. The volume of misinformation is expected to increase substantially during this time, and digital literacy in Indonesia has not kept track with this growth in problematic information; social media are being used substantially for storytelling, and have considerable influence on public opinion. How can local media push back against this?

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Detta Rahmawan, whose interest is in the transmission of misinformation via WhatsApp in Indonesia. This platform is very popular in Indonesia, also because of its privacy and encryption features. But this also enables the spread of hoax content on the platform.

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the European Union are very broad, for instance, but also remind us that AI is more than natural language processing and machine learning only; there are many elements that intersect in the emerging AI ecosystem, and we might be better served by thinking about ‘hybrid intelligence’ (also involving humans) than pure artificial intelligence at this stage.

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.

We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.