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The first paper session at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Max Hänska, whose focus is on the role of social media in political debate during Brexit and the 2017 U.K. general election. Max's study tracked tweets including a set of keywords for both events, as well as following the Twitter accounts of some 2,100 candidates in the election.

The Brexit 'Leave' campaign was slightly more active in its tweeting efforts; more users participated, and they were more active at tweeting. In the general election, Labour supporters turned out to be more numerous and more active. Leavers outtweeted Remainers by …

The second morning keynote at Future of Journalism 2017 is by Claire Wardle, in a pre-taped keynote (thanks to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security). She begins by introducing the First Draft project, which takes a similar approach to news fact-checking organisations, but instead focusses on claims and visual content circulated by unofficial sources prior to publication in the news. (The overlap between these approaches is also of great interest.)

How can computational techniques help with this; how can unofficial material be effectively verified; how can this be treated by law and regulation; and how does this address the current …

It's Thursday, so this must be Cardiff and the Future of Journalism 2017 conference. We start with a double-barrelled keynote involving Silvio Waisbord and Claire Wardle, and Silvio starts us off by considering the role of journalism in a 'post-truth' environment. There's been a great deal of discussion about 'fake news' and 'post-truth' in the aftermath of Brexit and Donald Trump's election, much of it from outside of this discipline – so what can journalism studies add to it?

These are odd times. The criticism of corporate news is now louder on the right than on the left; social constructionists …

The final paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is presented by Caroline Fisher, whose focus is on Australian politicians' approaches to bypassing the scrutiny of the parliamentary press gallery. This is based on a set of 87 interviews with key media actors from the Howard era, including the former Prime Minister himself, as well as on an analysis of the social media activities of five Australian political leaders and interviews with their press secretaries.

Politicians have always sought to control the information flows that cover their activities; through social media they have become more easily able to bypass conventional journalistic …

The next paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is by my colleagues Brenda Moon, Ehsan Dehghan, and me, and I'm presenting it, so I won't liveblog it, of course. Below are the slides, though:

The next paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is presented by Ariadne Vromen, whose focus is on debates of housing affordability on Facebook. Social media are of course being used for everyday political talk, but the private pages of individuals are very difficult to observe effectively, and for good reason. But the Facebook pages of mainstream media outlets serve as a kind of intermediary, semi-public spaces for such talk; here, it is possible to observe engagement, interactions, and sentiment, as well as reactions to media framing of current issues.

Housing affordability is a major political issue in Australia, especially …

The final paper session at ANZCA 2017 starts with Caroline Fisher and Glen Fuller, whose focus is on Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's conversations about the National Broadband Network project on Twitter. Turnbull was a comparatively early adopter of social media, and one of the big challenges in becoming PM was whether he would continue to use Twitter in the way he had before, or would lapse into a more broadcast-oriented tweeting style.

Turnbull's social media activities can be understood as an attempt at authentic engagement, and he has at times engaged in real conversation with interlocutors on the …

The final ANZCA 2017 keynote is by Wanning Sun, who continues our focus on China. She begins by highlighting the challenges that journalism, media, and communication educators are now facing in teaching an increasingly international cohort of students – many of whom, in the Australian context, come from China: how should they present the global media environment and its central issues, including questions such as freedom of speech and media bias, to such a diverse group of students?

The key problem facing international students, to begin with, is a lack of English proficiency, and this is still pronounced especially for …

The final day of ANZCA 2017 begins with another set of keynotes. We start with Daya Thussu, whose focus is on the global media and communication environment. Globalisation is central to this, but the discourse of globalisation itself is now changing, and this forces us to rethink the whole notion of 'the global'. Daya focusses here on developments in China and India, in particular, as representatives of the wider group of BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), where these processes are especially apparent at this stage.

These are very different countries with different political and media systems …

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2017 session is Bill Dodd, whose focus is on 'propositional journalism': journalism that proposes change and assesses possible future solutions and opportunities. This has been suggested as a way to re-engage audiences with democratic processes and might be seen as empowering, but whose ideas are presented and how they are framed in such journalism – that is, who is chosen to be empowered – can also reveal democratic deficits.

Bill addresses this through a case study from Tasmania: here, political discourse has long been proposition-centred, especially in response to questions about the balance between …