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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here: