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The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is An Nguyen, with a focus on pandemic news avoidance on social media in Vietnam. A key aspect of this research project, therefore, is its focus on a non-democratic society: pandemic news avoidance has been studied in some detail already for western democracies and their saturated media environments, but the focus on Vietnam is new. How does news avoidance work here?

The project conducted some 21 face-to-face interviews with Vietnamese news users, with a focus on social news use and avoidance, and from these interviews developed a broader questionnaire which was promoted …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Ana Filipa Oliveira, whose interest is also in young people and the news. There is a sense that younger and older generations have very different relationships with the news, and this is expressed also in their divergent news consumption patterns; younger audiences tend to favour more autonomous, hands-on and creative approaches to knowledge acquisition, and are also more active media producers on their own terms. But what do they think news is, and how does this affect their news habits? How might we research this?

Examining this may need the use …

The final session on this first full day of IAMCR 2023 is on how audiences consume (or perhaps engage with) disinformation, and the first presenter is Hillel Nossek, with a focus on news consumption by Jewish youth in Israel. He describes this group as ‘newsers’: new news consumers. What characterises this group, then?

The study built on a representative nationwide survey of 673 young people of age 15-18 (i.e. not quite of voting age just yet) at state and state-religious schools; questionnaires were distributed during school hours to ensure participation. The top news medium for this group was social media …

The final speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Beate Josephi, whose focus is on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Her interest is in the initial annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and the focus here is on how Russia argued its case at that point – in this case, through the coverage in the Russian weekly newspaper Argumenti i Fakti.

A background to this event was the postponement of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU by then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in favour of a greater alignment with Russia, and the Euromaidan protests that ensued in …

The third speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session is Barbie Zelizer, whose interest is in the ways Cold War logic hides propaganda in democracies. Practices of obfuscation are now ever-present, but our discussion changes depending on the type of regime (autocratic, democratic, …) we are talking about. In autocracies, information disorder is equated with propaganda, and linked to a long-term history of government control of information; in democracies, information disorders are seen as a new phenomenon linked to disinformation, and related to current conditions of polarisation, populism, and digital technology.

But during the Cold War, conditions in media and …

Up next in this IAMCR 2023 session is Nelson Ribeiro, whose interest is in patterns of political propaganda. He begins by referencing Orwell’s 1984 and the approaches to fabricating the past and rewriting history that the book describes; these approaches are somewhat similar to the way that the Italian fascists and German Nazis rewrote the past – and in such a way that the lie was so big that ordinary people could not even conceive of it being fabricated.

Similarly, lies circulated in Western media during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s, and their endorsement by US Congress …

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

But how do such tactics leverage the machine learning and AI systems of online platforms, and use AI in their …

And the final speaker in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Mavis Amo-Mensah, whose interest is in doctoral students’ research self-awareness following their thesis proposal defence. Most existing studies of such students focus mainly on their information-seeking behaviours and relationships with their supervisors, independent of discipline or location; the present study focussed instead specifically on communication students in Ghana, examining their research activities.

The study followed some nine PhD students from the University of Education in Winneba, Ghana, conducting in-depth interviews and observations and drawing on field notes. Research behaviours turned out to be anchored in boundary theory: participants …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Franziska Thiele, whose focus is on what communication scholars are saying on Twitter, and on whether this reflects different styles in international research communities. The principal focus here is especially on the ICA and IAMCR communities on Twitter.

Twitter has been an important tool for such scholarly communication over the past decade and more, though this is now under threat given the disastrous leadership of Elon Musk, but this activity is unevenly distributed: biomedical and social scientists appear to be especially active on the platform. Twitter use in the context of …

The third presentation in this hot IAMCR 2023 session is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on the discussion of generative visual AI (e.g. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) and its relationship to artists. There is a veritable media panic, but also a genuine discussion about how such generative AI tools are drawing on existing, copyrighted art for their creations.

Artists have reacted to this spreading of digital creation with some degree of concern: it challenges their role in society, their opportunity to earn a living from their art, and their authorship of creative works; many artists see the use of their …