Journalism

And the final speaker in this final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Darsana Vijay, whose focus is the crisis in Indian fact-checking. Misinformation in India is a pressing societal issue; this has been highlighted especially in the context of the wide circulation of mis- and disinformation on WhatsApp, and its effects especially in rural areas with low digital literacies.

Such misinformation thus especially affects marginalised communities, especially also Muslims in India; this is a product of the increasingly Hindu-nationalist orientation of the ruling BJP party under Narendra Modi. Social media platforms have …

The next speaker in this final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Helena Atteneder, whose focus is on news deserts and their mapping. Maps of news deserts construct spatial knowledge about journalism; news deserts themselves are a concept which refers to a lack of sufficient, reliable, and diverse local news, and this problem has been well recognised under this and other terms for some time.

But the term is also problematic due to its normative assumptions and descriptive fuzziness, and to approach this via mapping itself poses some notable questions. Mapping constructs rather …

We’ve just had a great roundtable of our Meta Content Library community of practice on this Saturday morning, so we’re already down to the final paper session of what has been another fabulous Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City. The first presenter in this session on journalism and its challenges is Gabriel Ponniah, whose focus is on US journalism’s reporting on generative AI during 2022-23.

ChatGPT burst into public consciousness during this time, and journalistic framing of emerging technologies has a significant impact of public understanding of such technologies; so, how did US journalism do? This project scraped …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sigrid Kannengießer, whose interest is in the media practices of Fediverse community activists as they contradict platform capitalism. Such platform capitalism is characterised by hegemonic organisation within current capitalist practices, and increasingly closely connected to technofascism.

Drawing on practice theory, the patterns of contradicting platform capitalism can be examined systematically; these include both acting with media (using media technologies as mediators) and acting on media (putting the focus of action on media and digital technologies, e.g. through infrastructuring). A focus on …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Michelle Kulig, whose focus is on perceptions of algorithmic recommender systems amongst news avoiders in the United States. The US political environment is characterised by terminal polarisation, with competitive news markets that incentivise outrage while being subjected to political pressures, and an absence of strong and trusted public service media that might function as an epistemic anchor.

News consumption here is now primarily via social media environments, which are to some extent algorithmically curated and therefore produce further epistemic disruption. There is …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the fabulous Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on the use of news in AI formats. This represents a new form of platform pressure, similar perhaps to earlier pressures to have news presented on social media platforms: now AI products are also being used to access news content, and news providers are forced to respond to this.

To date, news has appeared in AI largely because Ai companies have scraped news content from news Websites; this is governed (at least in principle) …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Destiny Hopkins, whose focus is on the terminology and identity of news influencers who have no formal journalism background or education. Such influencers have become increasingly prominent in US politics, and news influencers were invited to the Democratic National Congress alongside legitimate journalists, for instance.

This was seen critically by journalists and news organisations, of course, resulting in pushback from the influencers themselves; they pointed out the boundary work done by journalists to distinguish themselves from influencers, in particular. This is an …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sally Tuomola, whose interest is in the produsage activities of Finnish news influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. Her project engaged in semi-structured thematic interviews with 20 such influencers across the political spectrum, combined with digital trace data. These were chosen based on their self-presentation as correcting and countering mainstream journalism.

News influencers have been understood as doing boundary work in the journalistic field, critiquing or threatening mainstream journalism and positioning themselves as peripheral actors with distinct personas. Such news influencers engage …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Eddy Hurcombe, presenting a paper co-authored with Anand Badola. This explores how audiences engage with influencer-style news on TikTok and Instagram.

The rise of such news influencers is a sign of the continuing crisis of journalism, and particularly its loss of younger audiences in favour of other voices. Some of these are explicitly ideological, including deeply problematic far-right actors. In response, major news organisations are also employing news influencers who employ similar content aesthetics and create more informal news content …

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on news influencers, and we start with Carlos d’Andréa. His focus is on the Google News Initiative and its impact on shaping journalism in Brazil. Such initiatives promote specific ideas of journalism and innovation; GNI started in 2018 and serves in a sense as a media patron that promotes particular journalistic norms and practices.

GNI emerged in the context of demands that digital tech giants should reimburse news publishers for their content, and Brazil hosts some 22% of projects funded by GNI grants between 2018 …