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The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Paola Palomino-Flores, whose interest is in the intersections of media literacy and misinformation. Misinformation here is defined as false information that is shared unintentionally by users who believe it to be true but have failed to verify its accuracy. This can still disseminate quickly and then cause some very serious harms, of course, confusing people and leading them to poor decision-making.

Paola’s focus is on Peru, and she notes the high reliance of Peruvians on social media for their news; more than 60% of Peruvians get their news from social media …

The third speaker in this session at ECREA 2024 is Margaux Guyot, whose interest is in the evolution of the dynamics between sound and text in social media news videos, examined here for the Wallonie and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland.

Indeed, is text overtaking sound in news videos? There are four ways of engaging with audiovisual content on smartphones: addressing others, serendipitous exposure to video, opportunistic search, and premeditated viewing, and these provide a framework for the analysis here; this paper focusses on videos posted by seven Walloon and Swiss news outlets in 2020 and 2023, and classified them …

My own presentation, on the impact of the 2021 Australian Facebook news ban, was next in this ECREA 2024 session. The slides are available here:

I am presenting our research on the in the Australian Facebook news ban in the post-lunch session at ECREA 2024 this Friday, but we start with a paper by Visa Noronen which examines news organisations’ attempts to understand their audiences in the current media context. This is important for determining editorial direction, and the present study examines such processes for the Nordic countries.

There has been a significant shift towards online news media use in these countries, and audiences are even often prepared to pay for online news subscriptions. Visa interviewed some 16 staff from news organisations that are not …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is João Gonçalves, whose interest is in polarisation in the content recommended by YouTube in the Netherlands. This focusses especially on affective polarisation, on labelling of out-groups as extremist, and on a lack of discursive crossover between polarised opponents.

Past research on polarisation has shown a substantial role for non-news Websites; investigating YouTube recommendations is therefore especially important. A key distinction introduced in the present study is between content recommendations around established and non-established parties; additionally, the study also explored content recommendations specifically around right-wing parties.

The project selected five seed videos …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Remzie Shahini-Hoxhaj, whose interest is in visual affective polarisation on Instagram, focussing on political parties that promote extreme or radical right-wing views. Social media algorithms might in fact actively promote and amplify such content, but fostering in-group favouritism and out-group hostility.

This study examined the distinct visual framing strategies of far-right political parties in Europe. Such parties tend to emphasise their own distinct identities; use euphoric language for in-group identification and dysphoric language for out-groups; and include nationalist and historical symbols to appeal to their audiences. The study focussed on France …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Petro Tolochko, whose focus is on affective polarisation in climate activism visuals. Such content can be highly affective in climate activist communication, spark audience reactions, and spread online to promote the emergence of like-minded or opposing groups. The analysis here might include aspects of structural polarisation (using network analysis) and reactionary polarisation (using communication analysis).

An initial question might thus be which types of images lead to increased polarisation online; more recently, however, with the shift from Xitter to TikTok the role of videos in such activist communication has grown. Polarisation …

For the next session at ECREA 2024 I am once again in a session on polarisation, and we start with a double-header presentation by Quirin Ryffel and Nayla Fawzi. They begin with an overview of polarisation patterns in German – here, as in many other European countries, there is no simplistic left/right polarisation as there is in the US, but more usually polarisation on specific issues. One of these is environmental policy.

There is broad consensus on the science of climate change and the need for action in Germany; however, there are also strong perceptions of polarisation between groups who …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dominika Betakova, whose interest is in news avoidance – a growing pattern around the world. Such news avoidance is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, though: it may be intentional, or may simply represent a low level of news consumption – and the people who engage in one or the other practice are not necessarily the same.

Intentional news avoidance may be temporal (e.g. during the COVID-19 pandemic), and can lead to better mental health; it can also be related to greater adherence to misbeliefs, a lack of political knowledge, and less political participation …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Ernesto de León; his focus is on hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media. These are all united by an anti-establishment dimension: they peddle misinformation that has a potential to shape public perceptions. Ernesto points here for example to a strange case of such sites promoting stories about elite sportspeople collapsing on the field; they promoted these stories as part of an anti-vaccine campaign claiming (falsely, of course) a connection between such medical cases and their vaccination with the COVID-19 vaccine.

But such content also circulates on non-HAC media sites, and through …