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For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Irene Neverla, who introduces the concept of communicative sustainability. This may be a research perspective as well as an analytical tool for the study of mediatised societies.

Society is currently undergoing substantial transformative processes, driven by technological factors (digitalisation and artificial intelligence); economic factors (globalisation, turbo-capitalism, and neo-liberalism); political factors (the return of authoritarianism); sociological factors (especially the acceleration of change); and ecological factors (the overexploitation of naturals resources).

This might be understood as humanity reaching its limits, which generates a substantial amount of dystopia narratives to explain the present moment …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The aim here is to shape users’ views about particular issues, but also to shape their perceptions of broader political opinion, especially to create the impression that specific views are at more popular or unpopular than they actually are. How do social …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge …

The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …

The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Helena Lima, whose work studies the Spanish online platform P3, founded in 2011 and directed largely at younger, urban, high-brow readers. Incorporating a crowdsourcing approach, audiences have been invited to participate in the platform in a number of ways, too.

Previous research indicates that such projects might lead audiences to focus on ‘soft’ news, while the professional journalists continue to cover ‘hard’ news stories, and this may also enable the platform to do more with a limited set of resources; further, such collaboration may strengthen relationships between the journalists and …

The next presentation at IAMCR 2019 is by Pere Masip and Pablo Capilla, but presented by Jaume Suau. It begins with the fundamental question of what is news, and how this is perceived by audiences – do they employ the same newsworthiness criteria as journalists and editors? The project explored the news published by El País, ABC, El Confidencial, and Público in Spain, representing legacy and born-digital outlets from a range of ideological perspectives.

The study examined the five leading, most read, most commented, and most shared news items on each site over a period of time …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Jaron Harambam, whose focus is on the personalisation of news content to individual readers and the implications that this may have for the news that users encounter. This may help readers navigate a vast and complex information landscape, and enable news outlets to provide not only popular but also relevant niche stories to the relevant audiences.

At the same time, however, it may also mean that readers no longer share the same information landscape, and this could have deleterious impacts on democratic information and participation – the emergence of a ‘filter bubble’ is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Catherine Young, whose focus is the rise of of journalism metrics – audience engagement can not be measured considerably more closely by news outlets, and this influences editorial decision-making as well. Catherine looks at this in the context of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s mobile news services; ABC News provides a Facebook Messenger service, as well as pushing short news updates to services like Apple News and its own mobile app.

Public broadcasters are in an interesting position in relation to metrics, as they are chasing cultural capital more than economic capital …