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It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to …

The next speaker in this fast-paced final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Iuliana Calin, whose interest is in the susceptibility to disinformation. What is new about this today, given the long history of mis- and disinformation throughout history? Iuliana particularly notes the impact of AI and algorithms, of emotions, and of cognitive biases, and aims to build a psycho-social profile of the people most susceptible to disinformation, in order to develop communication strategies to address them.

Her study builds on a survey of 150 Romanian respondents, and tested participants’ susceptibility to disinformation, as well as several other personal traits …

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Karolína Bieliková, whose interest is in the resilience to disinformation on social networking sites amongst active users. How can such resilience be improved? Karolína’s research takes an individual-centric view, exploring users’ strategies for building their resilience.

Users who provide corrections to mis- and disinformation might be crucial here – what motivates them, how do they choose their strategies for engaging with mis- and disinformation, and how can they and their actions be supported and empowered? The present study explored this in the Czech Republic, through 60 interviews with active …

The next speakers in this final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Elizaveta Kusnetsova and Martha Stolze, whose focus is on computational propaganda and the broader relationship between algorithmic systems and mis- and disinformation. This has been highlighted especially by the use of algorithmic tools by the Russian propaganda machine, particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. This continues a long-standing tradition of Soviet and Russian propaganda by using new technologies.

The present study focusses on the ‘US biolabs in Ukraine’ disinformation story, and is interested in what information sources search engines provide in response to this …

The final panel of this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Václav Štětka; his focus is especially on countries with populist governments (the US, Brazil, Poland, and Serbia). What has been the impact from such populism on the COVID-19 crisis?

The present study is informed by the Receive-Accept-Sample model of public opinion formation, where the media diet online and offline determines the extent to which people are exposed to (i.e. receive) mis- and disinformation. How is this affected by uses of social and legacy media? Second, preexisting values and beliefs will affect how ready …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Alena Kluknavská, whose interest is in truth contestation on Facebook during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; it approaches this through a country-comparative study involving several European nations (Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland). Truth contestation is especially prominent during crises, but we know very little about the dynamics between contestants in this process.

This can be approached through discourse network approaches, exploring how actors shape discourses of truthfulness and create binary divisions between the liars and the truthful. Such divisions often also map onto anti-elite antagonisms …

The next presentation in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is by Laura Jacobs, who begins by outlining the function of political in- and out-group identification and its links to polarisation and conflict in society. Political parties make use of in- and out-group appeals in their messaging, and may also draw on populism in constructing ‘us vs. them’ oppositions.

Populism is a thin-centred ideology that positions the ‘pure’ people against the ‘corrupt’ elites; it might connect with a host ideology (e.g. socialism on the left or nativism on the right). This project, then, explores how left- and right-wing parties …

I got to the next session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference a little late, so I missed Christina Monzer’s presentation – I’ll start instead with Willem Buyens. His interest is in news on social media: social media remain a critical space of news consumption and engagement, and the dissemination of news here is also governed by the social media logics that affect news curation here.

Political actors also act as news curators on social media, and in doing so make specific news selection decisions; how audiences engage with the news shared by political actors then also depends on their …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Jihye Park, whose interest is in the role of media trust in reducing affective polarisation. Exposure to cross-cutting media has been recognised in the research as reducing polarisation, but what leads users to expose themselves to such cross-cutting media? Jihye suggests that media trust is critical to such media selection choices.

Her focus here is on affective polarisation – the emotional gap between in- and out-groups. This gap has been shown to grow in countries like the US and South Korea, for partisans of the dominant left and right …

The next speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel are Christiane Eilders and Henri Mütscheler, who note that positional polarisation (on distinct issues) also needs to be distinguished by level: micro-level polarisation between individuals; meso-level polarisation within groups or organisations; or macro-level polarisation between groups or organisations. Such polarisation is thus always relational (between two or more entities), as well as dynamic.

Most of the research to date has focussed on the micro- and macro-levels, especially focussing on political parties. There is also substantial focus on the affective dimension of polarisation, and on the movement of single entities towards …