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The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today starts with Joseph Gotte, whose focus is on the elective affinity between political and religious discourses about the ecological apocalypse. ‘Elective affinity’ here is a concept referring to the relationship between religious beliefs and social formations, lifestyle, and economic behaviours; it is the process by which two cultural forms enter into a relationship of mutual attraction and influence.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Khayrat Ayyad, whose interest is in how media institutions in the UAE engage with their audiences via social media. The UAE is a global leader in the adoption of digital technologies, and there are a number of state-sponsored or -subsidised media outlets across the UAE’s emirates, alongside for-profit media organisations.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping.

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko Ribać, whose interest is in the impact of authoritarian-populist politics on journalism. The project focusses on Hungary and Turkey as clearly populist and autocratic regimes, compared to Austria and Slovenia as countries with more intermittently populist governments. The focus is on the past ten years of journalistic experience in each country, and conducted through interviews with some 82 newsworkers across the four countries to identify the external forces impacting on their work.

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Sabina Mihelj, focussing on populist communication about the COVID-19 pandemic, across the US, Poland, Serbia, and Brazil. Such research is critical given the real potential (and genuine experience) of populists assuming positions of political leadership (as in the US or Brazil) and actively contradicting the health advice of pandemic experts.