Blog

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on China’s soft power in Africa. Africa has gradually become a key target of Chinese soft power activities, through economic investment, bilateral and multilateral engagement, and other initiatives. Its state media outlets have also established increasingly visible African operations. China also partners with African nations through BRICS, FOCAC, BRI, and the Belt and Road initiative. These initiatives seek to convince Africa that China is a more profitable partner than the west.

This is true for Nigeria, too – a ‘Chinese way …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Kata Horváth, whose focus is on political influencer videos in the 2024 Hungarian elections. Hungary has now backslid into authoritarianism, and its mainstream media system have been captured by political interests aligned with the Fidesz party; the social media environment is also severely affected by hostile narratives from disinformation influencers, however.

Hostile narratives are designed to create an enemy figure that provides a target for social frustrations, reinforce polarisation, and distract from real issues. Social media advertising is also dominated by the Fidesz party, in part …

My final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is on global conflicts, and starts with Nicole Marie Klevanskaya, whose focus is on Russian state-controlled and independent television reporting on acts of terrorism. This includes the 2024 terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall entertainment complex, which resulted in at least 140 deaths. This was Russia’s largest terror attack in years, and Putin quickly and incorrectly blamed Ukraine for it.

Russian media consists of independent and regime-critical journalists in exile, and state-controlled domestic media outlets that toe the official line. Studies on this media system often predate …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Hanye Yang, with a comparison of fact-checking operations in China and Hong Kong. Fact-checking has grown substantially in recent years, in response to the rise of mis- and disinformation; there is not a sizeable fact-checking sector in Asia too. But do western models of fact-checking apply here, especially in the context of non-democratic political systems and limited press freedom?

The difference between China and Hong Kong is interesting here, since their media systems diverged under British rule in Hong Kong but are perhaps converging again with …

The third speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Xiaoyang Lai, Xiaozhen Jiang, and Yajing Zhu, who begin by referring to a recent incident in China where a car rammed into a crowd of people. They point out that media reporting about the reasons behind this attack was edited after the fact, and are interested in why this might be the case.

This incident can be seen as a case of lone-wolf terrorism, and such cases are reported very differently in mainland and diaspora Chinese media. Chinese media tend to favour a disruption-response-restoration framing, emphasising …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Ivan Paganotti, whose interest is in Brazil’s suspension of Xitter in August to October 2024 as a result of its non-compliance with Brazilian court rulings on media regulation. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court has been quite active in the field of media regulation, and its suspension of Xitter has set a precedent that may also be of relevance to other jurisdictions.

Xitter had been found to be non-compliant with Brazilian court rulings on blocking and removing the profiles of far-right influencers who were undermining its democratic …

For the post-lunch session on this third day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m in a session on mis- and disinformation infrastructures, where I’ll start by discussing our platform audit of how artificial intelligence chatbots respond to queries about well-known conspiracy theories. Here are the slides:

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Peichi Chung, whose focus is on digital labour in the context of e-sports. This is a rapidly growing area of digital entertainment, with an inaugural e-sports Olympics to be held in Dubai in 2027.

Past work on e-sports has focussed on e-sports as fan-based digital labour, and linked this to emerging worker identities in the gig economy. This is further disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence and its embedding into video games, and the gamification of digital work; overall, video gaming becomes a form of …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Byron Hauck, who begins by asking whose imaginaries for artificial intelligence we are dealing with. Right now, we are being told what AI is: we are in the middle of the technological sublime – we are given a story of what it is supposed to be, what its future is supposed to be, what we are supposed to do with it.

But these visions are not empowering: they allow the current moment to be defined by a handful of capitalist tech leaders, rather than by the …

I’m starting my third day at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore with a panel on the political economy of AI, which starts with Benedetta Brevini. Attention to artificial intelligence has increased substantially in recent years, of course, and so has concern about the political economy of AI – with a growing focus also on the environmental impact of AI technologies and services. The massive environmental impact of artificial intelligence has now been recognised much more clearly.

This is a conversation that can no longer be avoided; it has produced substantial coverage in media, reports, and other documentation, and there …