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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 …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vanessa Richter, whose interest is in the shaping of AI debates and trajectories on Twitter. Imaginaries of AI are still evolving, and involve a diverse set of stakeholders: industry, governments, NGOs, academia, and the media. This project examined the accounts engaging in the debate on Twitter, and classified these into a number of different stakeholder categories; on Twitter, much of the debate appeared to be driven by AI experts (and the same is likely true on WeChat as well, as other research shows).

The present project builds on the idea of …

It is Monday, 8:30, the temperature is 25° already, and there is no aircon or ventilation to speak of, so this must be the first paper session at IAMCR 2023. The topic this morning is on artificial intelligence and Twitter, and we start with a paper by Mina Momeni, whose focus is on digital storytelling through Twitter bots. Social media have been populated by a variety of bots that can post and interact with human users on social media, and to some degree mimic human activity as well – and they are being used for both pro-social and disruptive …

My conferencing year continues with the IAMCR 2023 in a boiling Lyon, France – it’s hot here even by Australian standards. The conference opens with a keynote by Christian Fuchs, which I’ll try to liveblog (though frankly this proved a challenge when I last blogged one of his presentations at ECREA 2014; let’s see how we go today). More liveblogging from regular conference sessions to follow over the week, at any rate.

Christian’s focus here is on explaining the challenges of digitalisation for humanity. This requires an understanding of the relationship between communication and the underlying economic structures, and …

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The …

The past few months have been quite busy with conferences and events, so here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to recently. I’ll start here with a handful of videos from recent events – more on my recent and upcoming conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters in subsequent posts…

First, in May I was delighted to participate in a three-part series on “Future-Proofing the Public Sphere”, hosted by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance and the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, and the Digital Media Research Centre at …