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The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Laura Teruel Rodríguez, with a paper on the intersection of polarisation and disinformation. Disinformation (and other forms of information disorder) has played a considerable part in driving polarisation, especially in contexts such as the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump as US President; the project is interested, therefore, in the correlations between polarisation and disinformation in the European quality press since 2017.

Newspapers chosen were major publications from France, Spain, and the UK, and some 286 relevant articles were coded for their framing. 45% of the sample were from …

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else. Spain has seen the emergence of several new parties, and this shifts the structure of the overall party system considerably.

New parties include centrist parties, extreme left parties, and far right parties …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Mazlum Kemal Dagdelen, whose focus is on nationalist discourse in the late-1960s Turkish Cypriot children’s magazine Tuncer (named after a teacher supposedly killed by Greek Cypriots). Cyprus is of course an island divided between Turkish and Greek Cypriot areas since the Turkish invasion of the early 1970s, and populated by Turkish and Greek communities since at least the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus.

Nationalism is a discourse structured around the nodal point of ‘nation’, and its distinction from other national identities, so the present study takes a discourse-theoretical approach. Here, this is …

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 …