Government

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session on cultural and heritage narratives surrounding the war on Ukraine is Shalabh Chopra, who begins by highlighting the changes in global power structures; in this the newly multipolar world the Global South is not readily on the side of the west in major conflicts, and may therefore also be less sympathetic towards Ukraine in the current war.

The post-lunch session that I’m attending at IAMCR 2024 is on communication around the war in Ukraine, with a particular focus on cultural heritage; I stars with Natalya Chaban. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has presented a new challenge here: a weaponised state is threatening Ukraine’s history and culture, and heritage sites are not simply collateral damage but are being actively targetted by Russia’s unprovoked aggression. Culture itself is thus a driver of conflict.

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Alexandra Pavliuc, whose interest is in the impact of gender in diplomatic communications between Ukraine and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While much of the focus has also been on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public persona, women have played a substantially larger part in public diplomacy by Ukraine on social media (and especially Twitter) since the invasion, and their use of such media has been distinctly different.

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Heesoo Jang, whose interest is in the potential biases in Large Language Models. In the United States, a majority of Republican nominees for office in the last mid-term elections denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and in Brazil similar election denialist groups have emerged. This is worsened by political attacks on press freedoms in these and other countries; globally, the challenges to democracies by the rise of far-right authoritarianism are growing. But most existing theories and concepts still focus on ‘stable’ democracies, wherever we might still be able to find them. Out approaches now need to centre normative democratic commitments.

The next speaker in this P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is Ruth Moon, whose focus is on the role of journalists as authoritarian actors. Journalists have an important democratic role to play, but this is complicated when they work within authoritarian regimes, and democracy can decline even in countries where there is relatively high media freedom. Further, of course, ‘media’ is not a monolithic entity: media are themselves diverse and have various understandings of and approaches to democracy.

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.