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.
.
This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …
The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).
This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …
I’m on the road again, and in Berlin for the two-day ECREA PolCom 2023 conference. We begin with a keynote by Lance Bennett, building on his recent book Communicating the Future. His opening question is how the major political ideas that affect everyone’s lives navigate the noise of everyday communication: how do they become dominant, and can we build a conceptual model to explain this? Are those ideas that become dominant actually good ideas, and if not, how can this be changed through better communication? Underlying this is also the question of power, of course.
