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The post-lunch session that I’m attending at IAMCR 2024 is on communication around the war in Ukraine, with a particular focus on cultural heritage; I stars with Natalya Chaban. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has presented a new challenge here: a weaponised state is threatening Ukraine’s history and culture, and heritage sites are not simply collateral damage but are being actively targetted by Russia’s unprovoked aggression. Culture itself is thus a driver of conflict.

But the reconstruction of such cultural heritage is also already being planned, and must be done in the most protective and thoughtful way, also supported by …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

From this perspective, elite narratives from one or another side of politics can influence media narratives, and this in turn influences public narratives; there is therefore likely to be a narrative competition between elites as they seek …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

This may be aided by the anonymity and algorithmic shaping of social media feeds. To examine this, this study gathered some 5,000 posts and 67,000 reposts from Weibo about this incident, and found strong engagement in the early days after the event, with decline in activity after a few days …

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

It’s an early Monday in Christchurch, which means I must be at IAMCR 2024. I’ll present later in this session, but we begin this session with Linda Kong, whose focus is on the short-video addiction of rural Chinese elders. Young people in China are in fact worried about the substantial increase in the short video watching by elderly Chinese, and there even concerns about short-video addiction.

However, current research is unclear on such addictive patterns; it does not generally focus on Chinese or elderly users, much less both. In China, this is complicated by the traditional culture of filial …

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system …

The next speaker at the final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is the excellent Helena Rauxloh, with a paper on radical climate protests. Just recently, for example, the Just Stop Oil protest group recently defaced the Stonehenge standing stones, and received some very negative news headlines for this action – yet many of the headlines covering these protests did not even identify what these protests were about. Such radical protests can be compared against more conventional and largely non-disruptive protests like Fridays for Future.

These protests engage with journalism as an arena for and driver of polarisation …

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.

Italy has a multi-party political system with a variety of parties. The 2018 election was won by the populist Five Star Movement, governing together with the far-right Lega. In 2022, a coalition of right-wing and far-right parties …

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Alexandra Pavliuc, whose interest is in the impact of gender in diplomatic communications between Ukraine and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While much of the focus has also been on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public persona, women have played a substantially larger part in public diplomacy by Ukraine on social media (and especially Twitter) since the invasion, and their use of such media has been distinctly different.

There are 461 MPs in the Ukrainian parliament, of whom 20% are women; there is …

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Heesoo Jang, whose interest is in the potential biases in Large Language Models. In the United States, a majority of Republican nominees for office in the last mid-term elections denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and in Brazil similar election denialist groups have emerged. This is worsened by political attacks on press freedoms in these and other countries; globally, the challenges to democracies by the rise of far-right authoritarianism are growing. But most existing theories and concepts still focus on ‘stable’ democracies, wherever we might …