Government

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Kata Horváth, whose focus is on political influencer videos in the 2024 Hungarian elections. Hungary has now backslid into authoritarianism, and its mainstream media system have been captured by political interests aligned with the Fidesz party; the social media environment is also severely affected by hostile narratives from disinformation influencers, however.

Hostile narratives are designed to create an enemy figure that provides a target for social frustrations, reinforce polarisation, and distract from real issues. Social media advertising is also dominated by the Fidesz party, in part …

My final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is on global conflicts, and starts with Nicole Marie Klevanskaya, whose focus is on Russian state-controlled and independent television reporting on acts of terrorism. This includes the 2024 terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall entertainment complex, which resulted in at least 140 deaths. This was Russia’s largest terror attack in years, and Putin quickly and incorrectly blamed Ukraine for it.

Russian media consists of independent and regime-critical journalists in exile, and state-controlled domestic media outlets that toe the official line. Studies on this media system often predate …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Hanye Yang, with a comparison of fact-checking operations in China and Hong Kong. Fact-checking has grown substantially in recent years, in response to the rise of mis- and disinformation; there is not a sizeable fact-checking sector in Asia too. But do western models of fact-checking apply here, especially in the context of non-democratic political systems and limited press freedom?

The difference between China and Hong Kong is interesting here, since their media systems diverged under British rule in Hong Kong but are perhaps converging again with …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Ivan Paganotti, whose interest is in Brazil’s suspension of Xitter in August to October 2024 as a result of its non-compliance with Brazilian court rulings on media regulation. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court has been quite active in the field of media regulation, and its suspension of Xitter has set a precedent that may also be of relevance to other jurisdictions.

Xitter had been found to be non-compliant with Brazilian court rulings on blocking and removing the profiles of far-right influencers who were undermining its democratic …

The next presenter in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yujie Zhong, whose interest is in attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccinations. Political ideology influences public confidence in science; media coverage affects this, and the spread of misinformation, not least also via social media, further exacerbates it. This can then lead to substantial public health concerns, like widespread vaccine hesitancy.

Specific factors here may be public confidence in vaccine scientists, satisfaction with public health officials, and concern about false and misleading information. This study explored this through a multi-wave survey of some 10,000 American respondents during the COVID-19 …

The final session on this second day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on mis- and disinformation, and begins with Chia-Shin Lin. His focus is on misinformation during Taiwanese elections, which he says is prevalent in part due to the ‘funny’ relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. This is part of a broader  ‘China factor’ of political pressure and interference in other countries’ political processes, and similar to the way that Russia and other problematic regimes also interfere elsewhere. How do older Taiwanese voters perceive the circulation of misinformation through instant messaging, then, especially during the 2024 presidential …

And the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Haroon Hakimi, whose focus is on the BBC’s representation of Afghanistan in its news reporting. Internationally, people are often perceived through the popular image of their nation, and this is especially pronounced for countries which many people will have no personal experience of, such as Afghanistan.

More generally, national image can be shaped at the personal level, through friends and contacts; at the organisational level, where PR companies might run image campaigns; and the mass media level, where news reporting strongly affects how audiences perceive …

The next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on news and social media framing, and starts with Xu Pengfei, examining how Chinese and Korean news reported on the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge in 2023. Chinese and Korean news outlets reported intensively on this, given the fears about how the nuclear waste might affect their coastal regions.

Key to this study is news framing theory, which tends to identify a number of key framing approaches; in East Asia, historical frames are especially common in international reporting. How, then, did Chinese and Korean media frame the event, and what …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Harry Li, whose interest is in affective polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States. Such affective polarisation describes in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but past research has mainly examined how this plays out in two- or multi-party political systems, rather than towards broader issues and themes.

In China, while there is a one-party system that does not allow for partisan polarisation, polarisation around specific issues and topics may nonetheless exist; here we might regard friendly or allied countries as part of the in-group, and …

The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.

Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take …