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And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.

But the understanding of social media communication also requires a perception of the local context: in a region beset with civil and other …

It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig. His work is usually on mis- and disinformation, and he is interested in the underlying conditions of the digital knowledge society which supported the emergence of such information (dis)orders. His key concept here is the idea of counter-knowledge orders, with particular focus on the far right.

In contemporary society, falsehood is identified as a ‘disorder’ …

The final presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Florian Primig, whose interest is in how we make sense of misinformation. He participated in an expert citizen council in Germany that explored the question of misinformation, which sparked him to rethink these concepts – we ought to try some critical introspection and consider the societal factors that have challenged the established knowledge order and enabled the emergence of counter-knowledge orders.

That emergence is not necessarily a bad thing; the primacy of knowledge has always been problematic. Instead of citizens we are now seen as life-long learners, and this requires us …

Up next at the ICA 2024 conference is Svetlana Bodrunova. Her study emerged from a research project that sought to examine the transnational communication by migrants from the same countries of origin, which found global cooperation between female Russian-speaking bloggers with migration backgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic, about global issues and agendas; these might be understood as transnational publics.

What theories can we use to explain such publics? Are they spaces constructed through networked technologies (arenas) or imagined collectives that emerge as the result of the intersection of people, technology, and practices (publics)? What happens when the key actors here …

Up next in this final ICA 2024 conference session is Niklas Venema, whose focus is also on counterpublics. These have become a key concept for analysing polarised and fragmented communication environments in hybrid media systems, with the focus initially mainly on empowering counterpublics that support marginalised communities, while more recently we have also needed to theorise far-right counterpublics that require a further adaptation of this concept.

What is being studied under this term, then, and how it is conceptualised? The present study conducted a literature search of English and German articles between 2000 and 2023, identifying some 139 relevant articles …