‘Fake News’

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 …

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 …

For the post-lunch session on this third day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m in a session on mis- and disinformation infrastructures, where I’ll start by discussing our platform audit of how artificial intelligence chatbots respond to queries about well-known conspiracy theories. Here are the slides:

And the final speaker at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is Nisha Singh, whose focus is on negative online political advertisements in India, especially in the context of elections. Elections are critical to democratic processes, and enable the people to voice their concerns to politicians; they also educate the public about democratic and political processes and stimulate political discourse.

Advertising has long been central to election processes, but the rise of digital advertising has transformed this, and enabled new campaigning approaches; this is no different in India. The rapid uptake of social media in India has further …

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 third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Maham Sufi, whose focus is on misinformation and deepfakes in Pakistan. Deepfakes are AI-generated synthetic media, and their realism creates a substantial potential for audiences to be misinformed; however, image manipulation has long been a feature of political misinformation well before the emergence of AI image generation technologies.

Pakistan represents a hybrid regime with weak political parties that rely on the support of other elements of the establishment – not least the military. Image manipulation has a history here, directed at various leading politicians; this has …

The second presenter in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuheng Wang, whose focus is on war misinformation. This centres especially on perceptions of the Ukraine conflict amongst Chinese Internet users, which have caused substantial splits and controversies.

Misinformation surrounding the war has been widespread, partly because – unusually – there was limited censorship of official information, enabling users to accumulate knowledge and form opinions about the war more freely than is usually the case. Nonetheless, users might also believe misinformation about the war more readily if it aligns with their own political views, and an …

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 …

The workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld continues with a final session for today, which starts with Christian Grimme. His focus is on the role of AI in creating as well as fighting artificial communication. Artificial agents – bots – are not new, of course: there were email bots, Twitter bots, and there are many other forms of social bots, which are now also increasingly integrated with and driven by Large Language Models. There are also prosocial bots which are used to counter more problematic bots.

Automation can mean various things, though. Closed-loop systems use feedback mechanisms …