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The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The focus here is on Twitter and YouTube, working with some 18 million tweets and 59,000 YouTube videos between 2012 and 2022 that contain the term ‘woke’ and its derivations. These were addressed through …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, whose interest is in visual political communication across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in Brazil in the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Visual affordances are critically important in political campaigning, and such affordances continue to change; this works differently across different platforms, and cross-platform and/or multi-platform studies are therefore also critically important.

The project gathered some 23,000 images from the three platforms during the two presidential campaigns, focussing on the two presidential candidates; it used the Google Vision API to identify features in these …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

, and starts with Ryan Moore. Past research has explored the impact of social media on access to mis- and disinformation sources, but remains somewhat inconclusive or very context- and platform-specific. Some of this is drawing on self-reporting; some on browsing data (where it usually focusses on direct referrals from social media platforms); a more indirect link has yet to be explored in full.

Here, social media posts may lead people to other places online that then lead …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Helena Rauxloh, exploring how conspiracy ideation explains general news consumption. This is part of the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten.

Engagement with news and current affairs has a very important democratic function, but engagement with niche and alternative media especially on the far right also exposes users to content that differs markedly from mainstream news content in style, editorial practices, business models, and strategic aims, while there are also considerable differences in approaches within such right-wing alternative media. Engagement with such media might especially also relate …

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Claire Wonjeong Jo, whose focus is on the effects of cross-cutting exposure – these are seen as including both a better-informed citizenry and greater attitude and affective polarisation, and/or no effects at all. Past research draws largely on survey data, and measure a range of attributes; but perhaps there is a way to observe the actual news use behaviours of participants that provides more direct empirical data.

This study compares such data for South Korea and the United States; it applies social judgment theory, expectation violation theory (which suggests that …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

How different are these conceptualisation? What are their possible implications for democratic outcomes? In spite of the considerable differences between their political systems, both Greece and Brazil had two …

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

This may involve selective exposure (choosing attitude-consonant media content) as well as defensive avoidance (selectively filtering out attitude-challenging sources and information) – and these are not necessarily inherently connected as a zero-sum game. The present study applies this to the coverage of climate change, where conservative media that challenge the accepted science on climate …

And the final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful T.J. Thomson, who has explored the use of AI in newsrooms for the past few years in a number of contexts. His present study interviewed journalists at major news outlets in five European countries and Australia, to explore the use of generative visual AI in news production as well as the policies and principles surrounding it.

Key challenges that the (predominantly visually focussed) journalists identified here included the use of AI-generated images to mislead and deceive audiences (for instance in the current war in Gaza) …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yanning Chen, whose interest is in how journalists’ perceptions of AI affect their adoption of such tools. This draws on a survey of some 455 Chinese journalists, which sought to identify the utility value that these journalists perceived for AI tools, as well as their personal preferences related to the utilisation of these tools.

This is also a matter of social projection, where people make judgments about the views about others who are similar to them; Chinese journalists, like journalists elsewhere, form a professional group cohort that is relatively homogenous …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Victoria Ertelthalner-Nikolaev; she notes that AI remains seen in a number of different ways by journalists, and attracts both positive and negative perceptions: it is seen as a valuable new tool, but also as something that could replace some journalistic jobs, and might affect the quality of journalistic converage. This is also affected by broader perceptions of AI in society, of course.

The present study examined these attitudes amongst journalists, to evaluate their sociology-technical imaginaries for these new technologies. Such imaginaries are often dichotomous, and the choice between positive and …