After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

The final presentation in this final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhieh Lor, Jihyang Choi, and Jaehyun Lee, who introduce the idea of a virtuous circle between nerds, political efficacy, and political participation. However, such active citizenship has continued to evolve, and new forms of political engagement like hashtag activism have emerged in the meantime – so how do people engage with politics today? What is their political participation repertoire?

Such political participation may include offline and online participation, lifestyle politics, and selective issue-based participation; the repertoire encompassing these participation styles may vary widely from …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is the great Renee Barnes, with a paper on strategic political news avoidance. This is a comparative study between Australia and Singapore, but the paper today is about the Australian side. Political news is of critical importance, yet information overload, issue  fatigue, lack of media trust, emotional reactions to the news, a perception of low relevance and impact, and general indifference all contributing to news avoidance; there may also be a difference between intentional and unintentional news avoidance.

How do all these factors intersect with each other …

The next speaker in this final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Marco Dohle; his interest is in everyday political consumerism. This is generally defined as consumers use of the market as an arena for politics, in order to change market practices that are found to be ethically, ecologically, or politically questionable. This is a widely used form of political participation, and is often expressed through boycotts or ‘buycotts’.

Such activity has increased on recent decades, driven by one or more of four megatrends: globalisation, individualisation, value change, or digitalisation. Digital media use is often associated with …

The final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts with Xue Mi, Yang Yang, and Zhen Ran, who begin with an introduction to the platformisation of online communication in China; such platforms also actively collaborate with the Chinese government on political initiatives. Political exposure on Chinese social media platforms could have various effects; this paper explores exposure to information from the Communist Youth League, an organisation for elite youth of 14 to 28 years, in Province A.

The CYL has various mechanisms for connecting within members and broader audiences: coercion, where WeChat is used for membership payments and …

The third paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Yishen Zhao, exploring inter generational differences in algorithmic perceptions, with a particular focus on low-carbon technologies. Climate change is now an urgent crisis, but different generations respond to climate issues in very different ways – including through their social media uses.

This study builds on the theory of planned behaviour, which suggests that social media use might influence low-carbon intentions; and on patterns of algorithm appreciation and algorithm aversion in social media use, which may also affect social media activity patterns. In combination, these provide …

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 next speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Guolin Chen and Xialei Zhang, whose focus is on the global media landscape. Increasingly, we have seen the emergence of state-driven English-language networks, including CGTN from China, RT from Russia, TRT International from Turkey, etc. This goes beyond mere propaganda, which is too simplistic and broad a label; it represents a soft power agenda.

But how do such media construct their imagined communities, both at the national and global level – indeed, how do they advance beyond imagination and towards expressing their vision of these communities …