The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jeeyun Sophia Baik, whose interest is in the long-standing allegations of anti-conservative bias that have been made against social media platforms. Such claims have been embraced prominently by Donald Trump and other far-right actors, in particular, and some US politicians have even attempted to ban what they understand as ‘social media censorship’.

The problem is that claims of anti-conservative bias have been proven to be unfounded by a range of studies, and that there is in fact a substantial platforming of conservative and far-right voices by social media …

The second speaker at this IAMCR 2024 session is Lisa Waller, whose focus is on how Australian journalists have been converging institutionalised child sexual abuse in regional Australia, following a Royal Commission into such abuses. This takes the form of a poetic inquiry, which builds on transdisciplinary collaboration between journalism research and creative practice and enables a focus on the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life.

The work builds on 16 interviews with well-established and emerging journalists who covered the victim-survivor testimony of individuals in the regional Victorian town of Ballarat …

And the final day at IAMCR 2024 starts for me with a session on journalism research. The first presenter is the wonderful Eli Skogerbø, whose focus here is on the media coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the injustices perpetrated against the indigenous Sámi people in Norway. This work emerges from the Trucom research project, which importantly also involved Sámi researchers.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Norway operated from 2018 to 2023, and investigated the ‘Norwegianisation’ policies towards the indigenous Sámi people as well as the minority Kvens (or Norwegian Finns) and Forest Finns. Its explicit aim …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Chen-ling Hung, whose focus is on Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan during the presidential election on 13 January 2024. Given its exposed position at the frontier between democracy and autocracy, Taiwan is most targetted by foreign disinformation attacks, yet remains a democratic country with the highest level of press freedom in Asia; there is considerable social awareness of disinformation challenges.

This study examined the means and themes of Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan, and the responses to this from Taiwanese society. It centrally builds on the concept of democratic resilience …

The third presenter in this IAMCR 2024 session is Joanne Kuai, whose interest is in LLM-powered chat bots and search engines. There is a considerable shift now underway in search: instead of presenting a list of search results, search engines are gradually moving towards the presentation of a summary of the search topic, with references attached. This is true for Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Baidu search, and especially important as more than half the world’s population participates in elections in 2024.

This project focussed on results from Microsoft Copilot on the Taiwanese presidential election earlier in 2024. In particular …

The final IAMCR 2024 session for today is in disinformation and polarisation, and starts with Ivan Paganotti’s presentation on institutional communication by the leading candidates’ campaign Websites in the 2022 Brazilian election. In particular, he is interested in whether and how they tried to respond to electoral disinformation, and whether they had policies to curtail such disinformation once in office.

Data collection focussed especially on the period between the first and second rounds of the election, and examined any attempts at fact-checking electoral disinformation as well as responses to the federal administration’s social media guidelines.

The Lula and PT campaign episodically attempted to contest every new piece of what it considered to be false information, and also structurally debated the overall impact of disinformation on the political process. But its own efforts to promote ‘fact-checks’ of false information largely focussed on amplifying the responses from partisan trade unions and other organisations that were close to its own political interests.

The Bolsonaro and PL campaign avoided any discussion of disinformation; the term did not appear on the PL Website, and Bolsonaro himself did not have a Website of his own (only social media accounts). Bolsonaro only generally complained about being the victim of various ‘lies’ by his opponents, deflecting criticism directed at him and questioning the very existence of ‘fake news’ as a meaningful category.

Neither of these two strategies are especially productive; neither make a meaningful contribution to the fight against mis- and disinformation. They also do not align with the federal guidelines against disinformation published by the previous Rousseff and Bolsonaro administrations.