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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 17:08

Climate Change in Canadian Political Discourse

Politics | Elections | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Serge Banyongen, whose interest is in political communication and agenda-setting on climate change during the recent Canadian election. Climate change has become an increasingly important political topic in Canada, but this is not always reflected in election results; this is in part because ecological discourse is being cannibalised by economic issues.

This study approaches the debate through a production, process, and perception triangulation, analysing political discourse, media content, and voter responses. This builds on framing theory, agenda-setting theory, issue attention theory, and issue voting theory.

Pre-election …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 17:06

Portuguese Parties’ Facebook Posting about Climate Change

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

I’m a little late to the post-lunch session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, which has started with Ana Margarida Barreto’s paper on discussions of climate change on eleven Portuguese parties’ Facebook pages. They investigated the presence of various climate change-related topics on those pages.

Two broadly green parties talked about climate change considerably more than any of the others; though during the election all other parties also talk somewhat more about climate change. Most parties share a substantial number of images and videos, though the far-right populist Chega party exclusively shared links and no audiovisual content.

Minor and …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 13:59

Examining Algorithmic Gatekeeping Values via News Recommender Patents

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Artificial Intelligence | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

And the final speaker in this entertaining session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Junbin Su, whose interest is in algorithmic gatekeeping in AI news recommendations. What values guide such gatekeeping decisions?

Conventional journalistic gatekeeping reflects editorial decisions about news values, and a number of competing lists of such news values have been proposed over the decades. Algorithmic gatekeeping may build on these values, or introduce others – not least also linked to platform metrics like user engagement or shareworthiness. This might under- or overemphasise certain news values.

This study explored this by identifying some 100 news recommender …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 13:42

What News Does Microsoft Copilot Actually Recommend?

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Artificial Intelligence | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Timothy Koskie, looking for media pluralism in AI-generated local news. But actually, these systems are not necessarily artificial intelligence in the full sense of the term: they are simply content generators. These systems feed on media content, and will make mistakes as they do so; this is not necessarily all that different from human-driven news media, however.

But how do AI content generators fit into the media ecosystem? Can they contribute to media pluralism, and thereby increase the media ecosystem’s health? If so, this could considerably …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 13:19

The Changing Sentiment of BBC News’ Coverage of Afghanistan

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

And the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Haroon Hakimi, whose focus is on the BBC’s representation of Afghanistan in its news reporting. Internationally, people are often perceived through the popular image of their nation, and this is especially pronounced for countries which many people will have no personal experience of, such as Afghanistan.

More generally, national image can be shaped at the personal level, through friends and contacts; at the organisational level, where PR companies might run image campaigns; and the mass media level, where news reporting strongly affects how audiences perceive …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 13:01

Framing Cyberviolence in Weibo Discussions

Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Shuo Li, whose interest is in the framing of cyberviolence on social media in China. Such cyberviolence has been on the rise on platforms like Weibo, and is disproportionately directed at women and vulnerable groups; it includes insults, defamation, rumours, and privacy violations.

How do Weibo users themselves frame such phenomena? Are there differences between ordinary and influential accounts, and between posts with high and low interactivity? Do group polarisation and discursive power play a role?

This study works with some 161,000 Weibo posts containing the …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 12:44

Framing the Fukushima Waste Water Release in Chinese and Korean Media

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on news and social media framing, and starts with Xu Pengfei, examining how Chinese and Korean news reported on the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge in 2023. Chinese and Korean news outlets reported intensively on this, given the fears about how the nuclear waste might affect their coastal regions.

Key to this study is news framing theory, which tends to identify a number of key framing approaches; in East Asia, historical frames are especially common in international reporting. How, then, did Chinese and Korean media frame the event, and what …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 11:48

Polarisation and Populism amongst Young Voters in Pakistan

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Amrat Haq, whose focus is on polarisation amongst young people in Pakistan. Pakistani politics has long been populist in nature, and dominated by two broad political groups; however, a third party emerged in the 2010s in the form of Imran Khan’s highly personality-base party, and particularly courted younger voter groups – not least also through its use of social media.

This use of social media by Khan’s party was notable especially in the 2018 election; by the 2024 election the other parties had also caught up …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 11:47

Affective Polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Harry Li, whose interest is in affective polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States. Such affective polarisation describes in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but past research has mainly examined how this plays out in two- or multi-party political systems, rather than towards broader issues and themes.

In China, while there is a one-party system that does not allow for partisan polarisation, polarisation around specific issues and topics may nonetheless exist; here we might regard friendly or allied countries as part of the in-group, and …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 11:46

Patterns of Polarisation on Chinese Social Media Platforms

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in polarisation in hybrid media systems. She notes the specificity of polarisation patterns to specific media and political systems; observations from the US do not translate easily to other countries, for example. How might polarisation unfold in as tightly controlled a media system as China’s, for instance?

Discursive power in China is distributed across state-owned mainstream media, other commercial media, individual influencers on social media, and ordinary users on social media platforms. Such platforms include Weibo, WeChat, and leading Q&A platform …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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