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The final presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Luisa Martinez-Garcia, about a ‘fake news’ event in Spain that involved a widely shared news story claiming that a local town attempted to stop the time. This is an example of a post-truth event, Luisa suggests.

Post-truth stories make false equivalences, referencing Web content and building on emotional argument. They deny empirical evidence and instead connect to readers’ commonsense understandings of the world. Importantly, the concept of post-truth is related, but not identical to ‘fake news’, and the latter is currently used significantly more widely, in spite of its contested …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

In Australia, for instance, there was substantial coverage of the ‘fake news’ debate in the U.S., sensitising voters to the issue; the use of ‘fake news’ as a label for news coverage particular politicians did not like; and outright lies about a ‘death tax’ purportedly …

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

These stories are what can be understood as Euromyths, representing a second-order semiological system …

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

There is substantial mistrust of electoral authorities given that, until recently, Mexico had the same party in power for some 70 years; in 1988, the system that provides vote count updates broke down altogether as it showed the opposition in the lead, and by the time it came back online the government was back in the lead. This is still seen as a marker of the worst …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Edson Tandoc Jr., who begins by pointing out the continuing shift to online and social media as a critical source of news – in Singapore, some 47% of users now access news via Facebook, for instance. This also enables audiences as well as news organisations to engage in promotion, distribution, data collection, and engagement around the news.

Sharing links to the news on social media is now also a form of cultural currency, therefore. Compared to other forms of news transmission, sharing news links increases the speed and reach of the news …

The next speakers at IAMCR 2019 are Thomas Eckerl and Oliver Hahn, whose interest is in the role of Instagram in political communication in Germany. The adoption of such platforms for political communication is an example of growing mediatisation in society as such, and in politics in particular, as well as a sign of the continuing shift towards more participatory media forms and from top-down to bottom-up communication over the past two decades or so.

What is the role of Instagram in Germany in this context, then, especially in the context of the 2017 federal and state elections? How do …

The second paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Klaus Zilles, whose focus is on the distribution of disinformation on WhatsApp. The messaging platform has been embroiled in disinformation events in a number of countries in recent times, and has now begun to fund several research projects into the phenomenon, including the present study in Spain.

Spanish users are relatively active on the platform, spending more than one hour per day on average on WhatsApp. They are also increasingly using it to share the news, shifting away from more open platforms like Facebook and Twitter to …