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Next up at IAMCR 2023 are Aleix Martí and Roger Cuartielles, whose focus is on the circulation of information in Spain during the COVID-19 crisis. Legacy media as well as social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram played key roles in this infodemic. Social media in particular played a disintermediating role, enabling the further spread of mis- and disinformation.

The present project sought to explore the information consumption habits of Spanish news users, including the role of social media, the perception of disinformation, and the perception of official information channels. It approached this through a survey of some 1,000 …

The next speaker in this afternoon session at IAMCR 2023 is Ester Minga, with a focus on the intertwined crises of migration and COVID-19 in Portugal. Portugal does not receive as many asylum requests as larger European countries, but has been very proactive in taking in its share of migrants since the major refugee crisis in 2015; this is a continuation of Portuguese Luso-Tropicalism.

The present study explored attitudes towards migration in Portugal by examining articles from a number of key newspapers in the country and analysing the news frames they used, especially in the context of COVID-19 outbreaks in …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Yingru Ji, whose focus is on attribution theory in crisis events. Crises are negative events that occur to individuals, organisations, or larger communities; attribution theory considers how (I think) these crises are attributed to certain causes. The present paper examined how this theory has been operationalised in published research.

Results are that there has been a considerable growth in relevant articles over the past 20-odd years; there has been a strong focus on organisational and individual crises, and an extreme overrepresentation of the United States in the research. Media settings were …

The post-lunch session on this second day at IAMCR 2023 starts with Vered Elisha Malka, whose focus is on the consumption of news about the current Russian-Ukrainian war in Israel and Germany. Media coverage of the event has been extensive, of course, and news media consumption patterns may be influenced by a number of underlying parameters. Such media consumption patterns also affect public opinion about the war, of course.

Most existing studies of such patterns tend to focus on how people facing war use media to suit their information needs; the present study, by contrast, is interested in how people …

The final presenter in this IAMCR 2023 session is Junjun Yu, whose focus is on information cocoons on Sina Weibo. Such cocoons are theorised as close-off spaces where information circulates in an ideologically and informationally homogeneous environment, potentially facilitated by the algorithms and affordances of social media platforms.

Such information cocoons could be identified based on the homogeneity of their selection, their content, or their participants; the present study focusses on the content, in the context of Sina Weibo. It examines the degree of content homogeneity for each user; the posts by a user on the platform; the top information …

The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance. Such (intentional or unintentional) avoidance as well as use of alternative media is seen as problematic as it reduces people’s ability to participate fully in public debate, and should also be seen as a political act.

There are many definitions of alternative media; some …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Trisha Lin, whose focus is on health misinformation in the context of COVID-19. Such misinformation is damaging and highly politicised, and the present study examines this for the context of Taiwan’s polarised political system. The present study conducted a quantitative survey to examine the interplay between misinformation, polarisation, media literacy, and vaccination acceptance in Taiwan, therefore.

In principle, Taiwan responded well to the COVID-19 crisis, but had a major lockdown in May to August 2021 and suffered from considerable foreign cyberattacks during this time; vaccination take-up was also somewhat slow, and …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.

Time and dynamics are dimensions with their own logics here, and lead to a divergence of discourses within online talk. What emerges here (and Svetlana …

The first session at IAMCR 2023 this hot Tuesday morning starts with Raül Nuevo Gascó, and his focus is on populism. But this term is being used in very different ways by different scholars as well as in mainstream media, and instead Raül is moving from an essentialist to a constructivist perspective, and from an inductive to a deductive approach. This accepts that populism can have different meanings; that these differ between different national contexts; and that these meanings are collectively constructed in each case. So, how and where is this done in each case?

Meaning construction operates through the …

And the final speaker for this session and this day at IAMCR 2023 is Aline Duelen, whose focus is on the use of AI in combatting disinformation. Disinformation is a major problem in online communication spaces today, of course, and there is some existing research that identifies factors that play a role in detecting disinformation – but these cannot easily be automated, as their application usually requires the application of critical thinking skills. The development of more automated systems therefore requires citizen co-creation approaches.

The present project undertook such a workshop with 26 Belgian citizens. It first explored their news …