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And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Ferruh Yılmaz, whose interest is in far-right strategies for dealing with Critical Race Theory. He begins by noting the differences between culture and policy: people attach themselves to broader political and social identities at least as much as they do to good policies on specific issues.

Far-right populism builds on this by weaponising an affective rhetorical strategy: it promotes moral panics about cultural and moral issues that channels people’s diffused anxieties into a sense of unity against social elites, which transforms their ontological vision of society into a perception of …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on the propaganda of tomorrow. How might we democratise AI, and what does it mean for political systems?

In particular, what about AI systems that have been trained to appear human, and perhaps even to mimic real, historical humans: there is a long history of the preservation of real people’s traces, and these are increasingly also available in digital form; such traces can be used to train generative AI to produce content which resembles the traces of real persons.

Indeed …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Debadatta Chakraborty, whose focus is on the transnational authoritarianism of the Indian Hindutva movement. Indeed, the movement has been pushing for the replacement of the colonial name ‘India’ with the term ‘Bharat’, a traditional Hindu name for the country.

The Hindutva project is exemplified for instance by the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, which was built for an extraordinary amount of money on stolen land that previously belonged to a mosque that was burnt down by Hindu nationalists in the 1990s. The completion of the temple was celebrated by Hindutva activists …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is the excellent Rita Gsenger, whose focus is on the adaptive conspiracy ideation of online cults like QAnon. QAnon is a conspiratorial movement that combines several elements, centred on the elusive figure of ‘Q’ who posts occasional cryptic information drops on the 4chan message board, claiming US government insider knowledge.

The central claim here is that the world is secretly governed by a group of influential people who drink children’s blood, and there is an argument that QAnon can be understood as a cult: a novel social system emerging from secular or …

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Christian Baden, who begins by noting that propaganda has become a substantially growing concern again in recent years. Propaganda is more than just ‘fake news’, of course: it may provide actual facts, but out of context or with a biased spin, for example, and false information is often only used around the margins to enhance the propagandistic effect and establish epistemic authority.

Propaganda is therefore defined here as strategically planned public communication on political issues that claims a monopoly of truth and delegitimises dissent. This extends well beyond specific contexts …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiaohao He, whose interest is in ‘news finds me’ perceptions and its relationship with news efficacy perceptions. She begins, unfortunately, by highlighting the now debunked concept of ‘echo chambers’, and points out that existing studies of this often neglect news consumption practices – not least, the process of passive news consumption where individuals do not actively seek news, but instead rely on peers and algorithms for their information. Individuals with higher levels of passivity in news engagement tend to be more likely to believe in disinformation and have lower level …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lin Pan, whose interest is in investigative journalism in the social media age in China. She highlights the issue of mis- and disinformation on social media, which is a problem in China too, but notes that the impact of this problem on investigative reporting has yet to be fully understood.

This study therefore explored the impact of disinformation on Chinese investigative reporting. It drew on a hierarchy of influences model, where routine and organisational influences have stronger impacts on individuals than broader social and societal settings. The project conducted interviews with …

Up next at IAMCR 2024 are Virpi Salojärvi and Teija Waaramaa, whose interest is in the presence of Finnish legacy media on TikTok. Their move to explore this platform is part of a longer trajectory of journalistic transformation with the growing use of digital and social media technologies; this has also meant a greater incorporation of affective elements into journalistic coverage.

The present study focusses on the form and not the content of Finnish media’s TikTok uses. There is still relatively high trust in institutional media in Finland; TikTok has become a primary news source for younger generations, and the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Margaret Ng, whose interest is in the transition of journalists to other platforms following the enshittification of Twitter by Elon Musk. Twitter had been crucial to journalism for years, but after his takeover Musk began to suspend the accounts of various journalists who had offended his fragile ego; many journalists responded by sharing their Mastodon or other contact details, and saying they would leave Twitter – but did this actually happen, and how are journalists now using other social media platforms?

This project examined the activities of some 861 journalists on …

The second day at IAMCR 2024 starts with Jingxuan Gao, whose interest is in news on Weibo. She describes this as the newsification of social media, as the platform is becoming more important as a source of news for Chinese users. Weibo is broadly similar to Twitter, with some 598 million monthly active users.

Central to Weibo is Weibo Hot Search, which offers a list of trending topics on the platform and often packages entertainment information and soft news into a form of more serious news – newsifying them. This can be linked to the concept of infotainment, and may …