My own paper starts the final session at the the SEASON 2025 conference, presenting the Australian Search Experience team’s work towards assessing the effect of search query formulation on the diversity of search results, within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Here are the slides: 

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Melanie Radue, whose interest is in moral panics and polarised discourses in Malaysia and Germany. This is in the context of a turn towards the conservative right in countries around the world, which often uses and fuels polarising discourses through moral panics, leading to democratic backsliding. What is the role of traditional media in such processes?

The concept of moral panics helps us to understand how certain issues become identified and intensified in media discourse: moralised discourses have long been understood as intensifying polarised narratives; they …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Dorothy Njoroge, whose focus is on youth protests in Africa – these have been occurring around the world over the past decades, although African protests have been less visible in global media coverage than similar events in America, Asia, or Europe.

Africa has a very substantial youth population, but very limited socio-economic perspectives for its youth; they are politically marginalised, in a stage of ‘waithood’ where adulthood is suspended due to a lack of economic opportunities, but also better-educated and more technologically literate than earlier generations …

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 …

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 …