‘Fake News’

The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.

Do such perceptions of misinformation levels vary across countries, then, or across platforms? Does news interest or previous knowledge affect such perceptions? The present project surveyed people across 17 European countries and the US, and asked about perceptions for a range of social media platforms, messaging apps, conventional media, and alternative …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session on alternative media is Pablo Porten-Cheé, whose focus is on countering misinformation with narratives. He begins with an example of the public discourse in Slovakia about the Roma community. Dominant, prejudiced views circulate, but are also countered by some engaged users – yet such correctives may not be particularly effective if they are only using facts and are directed at little-engaged audiences; responses that take a more personal and affective narrative approach may be more powerful.

How can this effect of personal stories be explained? The underlying theory here is …

The third speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Miriam Milzner and Vivien Benert, presenting a content-based classification of German alternative news media. Recent definitions of such alternative media have moved away from a focus on these media as supporting subaltern counterpublics, and towards a focus on the emergence of right-wing online media as self-proclaimed alternatives to the mainstream.

The present project, then, explores the extent to which German alternative media use topical foci as a means of establishing themselves as alternatives to the mainstream, and uses those topical foci to categorise a diverse selection of these media …

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.

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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by …

And the final speaker for this session and this day at IAMCR 2023 is Aline Duelen, whose focus is on the use of AI in combatting disinformation. Disinformation is a major problem in online communication spaces today, of course, and there is some existing research that identifies factors that play a role in detecting disinformation – but these cannot easily be automated, as their application usually requires the application of critical thinking skills. The development of more automated systems therefore requires citizen co-creation approaches.

The present project undertook such a workshop with 26 Belgian citizens. It first explored their news …

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is by Livia Gardía-Faroldi, who presents a comparative analysis of disinformation on social media across the UK, France, and Spain. Such a comparative study is necessary given the very different political and media environments across these countries. Do the audiences in these countries differ in their interest and trust in the news; their concern about fake news; and their use of social media for informational purposes? How are these attitudes associated with one another, and does this differ across these countries? The project explored these questions through a questionnaire.

Key findings are …

The final speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Beate Josephi, whose focus is on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Her interest is in the initial annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and the focus here is on how Russia argued its case at that point – in this case, through the coverage in the Russian weekly newspaper Argumenti i Fakti.

A background to this event was the postponement of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU by then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in favour of a greater alignment with Russia, and the Euromaidan protests that ensued in …

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

But how do such tactics leverage the machine learning and AI systems of online platforms, and use AI in their …