Blogs

The first session after the keynote at ANZCA 2023 is on media, truth, and democracy, and starts with John Budarick. He begins by highlighting the considerable challenges to liberal media and democracies, from a range of interconnected crises; but from a different perspective journalism is constantly in crisis as it deals with the changing environments within which it operates.

It’s a Wednesday in November and I’m in Wellington for ANZCA 2023, my final conference for this year, where I’ll also present a keynote tomorrow morning. We start today with the first of the conference keynotes, however, by Maria Bargh, who begins with the customary acknowledgments of the peoples, places, and more-than-human aspects of the lands upon which we meet – and this is also related to the theme of the conference, ka mua, ka muri, or ‘walking backwards into the future’. This refers to the way we are out of balance with each other and with the planet – in our use of resources, in our perspectives on history and politics. This is a difficult predicament that needs to be confronted – ideally through shared ownership and collaborative governance models.

Maria suggests that there are several examples that provide pointers to solutions for this. One draws on Whanaungatanga – kinships and relationships: one collective in the South Island of New Zealand have a 500-year plan for land, resources, and community, for instance, and this governs the sustainable operation of their enterprises; these provide for participating families and sustain traditional practices (in farming and other fields) as well as reconnecting people to each other and the land and forcing them to look to the future.

A second example are projects for bioremediation, addressing the industrial contamination of lands – but without removing the contaminated soil altogether and by instead using longer-term in situ remediation approaches that draw on a range of fungi and tree species that are especially efficient at removing toxins from the soil. This represents a more caring relationship with the land, combining Māori and Wwestern scientific approaches.

I’ve had the pleasure of being featured in the latest round of QUT research promo videos, discussing our QUT Digital Media Research Centre research into polarisation, partisanship, mis- and disinformation, and other topics, and including the work emerging from my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Also featured are my excellent DMRC colleagues Ehsan Dehghan and Kate O’Connor-Farfan, and if you look closely there’s also a plug for my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real?

I think this came out quite nicely:

And along with other research leaders around the university, I also appeared in our latest university-wide promotional video. Don’t you just hate it when people finish your sentences for you? Seriously, though, this is a great overview of the breadth of research going on around the place…

The next and final keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Noshir Contractor; his focus is on the potentials inherent in computational social science. Communication research has become central to any academic discourse around the world over the past decades, but this also means that we must take on the grand societal challenges of the present day.

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 final paper session at COMNEWS 2023 today starts with Firma Qurratu’ain Abisono, whose interest is in responses to climate change misinformation. 72% of Indonesians rely on social media as their main source of information, but only 30% believe that social media is a reliable source. Younger people in particular are vulnerable to misinformation – they are highly influenced by digital media, and tend to expect information to find them rather than actively search for it.