The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.

Existing autocracies are often born this way: this is the case for China or Iran, for instance; conversely, backsliding democracies like Turkey, Poland, or Israel experience a change in their democratic institutions. Singapore or Hong Kong, in turn, are something else and in between …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on democratic backsliding, and begins with Kate Wright; her focus is on state-led democratic backsliding and its relationship with the political capture of public service media organisations. This is difficult to study due to the problems with gaining access to such media organisations, especially as the political capture is taking place; at best, we might review this after the fact through interviews with journalists.

The present study is in the unusual position of having been able to study the state capture of the Voice of America by the Trump administration both …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Isabella Glogger, whose interest is in reinforcing relationships between political identities and alternative news consumption. The focus here is especially on Sweden, where alternative media use has been on the rise especially on the right wing of politics, and has been connected with more pessimistic viewpoints on a variety of societal issues, especially also on climate change. Selective exposure tendencies have also been observed here, potentially generating more societal polarisation.

This is captured in the Reinforcing Spiral Model, which assumes that media effects and selective exposure are interconnected processes that …

It’s Friday morning and I’m in a casino on the Gold Coast of Queensland, so this must be the start of the ICA 2024 conference. I’m in a session on polarisation, and we start with a paper by Minchul Kim on the prediction of partisan media exposure through attitudes towards news brands. The interest here is in the United States, where the assumption is that partisan exposure might result in widely diverging worldviews.

Conventional approaches expect partisans to see certain news brands as ideologically aligned or counter to their own views, and to choose to engage or avoid news brands …

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

Public communication flows online are now a dynamic network, which is difficult to model …

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

What circulates here might be misinformation (claims that counter the currently available evidence, intentionally or not); selective information choices; and purposeful, fabricated disinformation. Typical disinformation campaigns might place deceptive information in an otherwise …

The third speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium session is Christian Stöcker, whose interest is in Germans’ perceptions of disinformation. Germans generally see disinformation as a threat to democracy, and are concerned about their own ability to detect disinformation when they come across it. But how do German business and journalism elites detect and verify such online disinformation? What detection strategies do they employ, and what design features (text, image, video, audio, memes) do they focus on in verifying online content?

The project engaged in some 25 interviews with such elite users from journalism and business (here, especially …

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with a presentation by Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on polarised debates around climate protests by groups like Letzte Generation or Extinction Rebellion. Such debates do not take place in a vacuum, however, but are informed and framed by media reporting. Is such reporting polarising these debates? What might this polarisation lead to?

There is a communicative side to polarisation processes, then – this can be understood as discursive polarisation: the divergence of a sphere of consensus into multiple such spheres that represent a disrupted public sphere. This might …