And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.

But the understanding of social media communication also requires a perception of the local context: in a region beset with civil and other …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose interest is in the shaping of communication flows about Ukraine across English, French, and German communities. Such efforts are part of information warfare, aiming to win the battle for public opinion and perception; Russia, in particular, is employing state media and troll armies to disseminate its propaganda about the causes and progress of its war against Ukraine. More recently, this has also include nuclear threats, rhetoric, and diplomacy.

The present study examines this with a particular view to cross-platform content flows and time-series analysis of the distribution …

p>The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Frederik Henriksen, whose focus is on the transformation of far-right political activities on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The far-right shifted the focus of its activities during this time, and joined forces with other anti-systemic actors, particularly pushing mis- and disinformation on the pandemic and the health measures implemented by governments to address it.

The present study sought to identify these discursive shifts in response to the pandemic, amongst far-right actors in Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden and across multiple social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Gab, VKontakte, Reddit …

I skipped the morning session this Saturday at the ICA 2024 conference as I was doing a live interview with Australian breakfast television about the current, ill-defined Parliamentary Inquiry into social media; more on that another time. So, I’m starting with a session on mis- and disinformation which begins with Sabina Mihelj, who has just published an open-access book on The Illiberal Public Sphere. Illiberalism has been on the rise at a global level, eroding liberal democratic systems – but how is this different from the concept of populism?

Especially in Eastern Europe, trends are going well beyond populism …

The last speaker in this ICA 2024 conference is Francis Lee, whose focus is on the experience of media capture in Hong Kong. Typically, such media capture can involve ownership cooptation, advertising and other financial incentives, cognitive capture of journalists through constant interactions, legal measures and the criminalisation of journalistic activities, and even violence with impunity against journalists.

But not all such strategies are used in all countries where such media capture takes place, and governments may change their mix of these strategies over time. Their choice depends on local contexts (such as the exploitability of economic or legal systems …

The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.

Existing autocracies are often born this way: this is the case for China or Iran, for instance; conversely, backsliding democracies like Turkey, Poland, or Israel experience a change in their democratic institutions. Singapore or Hong Kong, in turn, are something else and in between …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on democratic backsliding, and begins with Kate Wright; her focus is on state-led democratic backsliding and its relationship with the political capture of public service media organisations. This is difficult to study due to the problems with gaining access to such media organisations, especially as the political capture is taking place; at best, we might review this after the fact through interviews with journalists.

The present study is in the unusual position of having been able to study the state capture of the Voice of America by the Trump administration both …