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The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Hong Li, whose interest is in ‘grey actors’ in online public opinion. The case study here is the ‘Internet water army’: a group of users who are paid to post online comments on Chinese social media platforms in order to promote vested interests. This is an astroturfing effort for public relations and media manipulation, and has become a major social media industry in China.

Such users are ‘grey actors’ who manipulate public opinion; they cannot be easily distinguished from ordinary users since they often are ordinary users making some money on …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nazira Bairbek, whose focus is on the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Kazakhstan; some Russian users in Kazakhstan responded to the invasion by asking Putin to annex Kazakhstan as well, for instance, while many Kazakh people took the side of Ukraine and feared Russian aggression against their own country.

This reflects the complicated post-colonial nature of many post-Soviet nations; they have fought for their independence from Russian influence since 1991, but maintain close relationships with Russia, and some people in these countries believe that they cannot survive without …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Caixie Tu, whose interest is in Hong Kong residents’ discussions about government ordinances on social media. The key question here is who speaks out on social media, and for what reasons.

Users’ cognitive responses can mediate such processes; this may include news attention, news knowledge, information elaboration, and other aspects, and engagement with heterogeneous information sources may be especially important. Individuals’ issue involvement, which may be value-relevant or outcome-relevant, may also affect their level of engagement in such debates.

How do the two types of issue involvement mediate the influence of …

The next session at IAMCR 2024 starts with Svetlana Bodrunova, who introduces a methodological focus in the study of topic evolution in user talk on social media platforms. Key to this is the use of artificial intelligence tools.

Deliberative public communication research tends to remain strongly influenced by Habermasian normativity, but this is not necessarily very productive. It ignores the right of participants not to be deliberative, and therefore fails to fully understand the phenomenon of dissonant public spheres, or the cumulative nature of public discussion. We need to better understand how opinions accumulate online.

Big data approaches are central …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Liu Youmeng, whose interest is also in the impact of social media on affective polarisation in the Chinese public sphere. Indeed, high-choice media environments may generally increase affective polarisation, and selective exposure to pro-attitudinal content may have a significant role to play here. Individuals’ perceptions about the underlying opinion climate may also affect this, however.

The project examined this through a representative nationwide survey of some 1,300 participants in China, assessing affective polarisation through a feeling thermometer and pro- and counter-attitudinal content exposure through self-reporting.

The results show that counter-attitudinal …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in the impact of social media affordances on polarisation. This addresses the lack of cross-platform studies on polarisation in platforms, as well as the lack of work on non-western political contexts; the project therefore examines five controversial debates on three Chinese social media platforms.

Polarisation mechanisms include inclusiveness (involving all affected individuals), justification (through sufficient arguments and reasoning), and responsiveness (exposure to heterogeneous viewpoints), while platform affordances like entry barriers, content capacity, social networks, and interactional feedback in turn affect the presence and impact of …

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

This recognises that reality is not black and white, but that individuals may have different levels of affiliation towards a variety of political parties or positions; it measures the individual’s level of affiliation towards both poles of several possible scales of affiliation. These can then be …

The Wednesday at IAMCR 2024 starts with a paper by Yiming Liu, whose interest is in the interplay between moralised discussion and group polarisation. She begins by noting that deliberation within a structured moral framework can effectively reduce polarisation; morality can therefore be part of the solution to group polarisation.

The mechanism here is that a position that an individual would not normally support is framed in a way that is consistent with their moral values, and thereby fosters consensus. But a moral appeal is not always productive: it can also introduce a binary distinction between good and bad, right …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Constanza Ortega Gunckel, whose interest is in the coverage of the Chilean wildfires in 2024. Chile regularly experiences such fires in February, but the 2024 fires were exceptional in their extent and death toll; this also increased Chileans’ need for information.

Social media – and especially also Instagram – were especially critical here, and Instagram users also posed questions towards the media to better understand what was going on here. The present project examined such news coverage and user comment in Instagram from the perspective of a dramatic curve in the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nermine Aboulez, whose focus is on global reactions to the 2023 Israeli-Palestine war. The current war is of course only the latest escalating in a conflict that has been going on for more than 70 years; it began with Hamas’s surprise attack and kidnapping of Israelis, and escalated with the start of Israel’s still ongoing war in Gaza.

The conflict has been covered extensively in the media, and part of the focus here is especially on the US media. Media can play a role in escalating or deescalating conflicts, not least …