Social Media

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in the impact of social media affordances on polarisation. This addresses the lack of cross-platform studies on polarisation in platforms, as well as the lack of work on non-western political contexts; the project therefore examines five controversial debates on three Chinese social media platforms.

Polarisation mechanisms include inclusiveness (involving all affected individuals), justification (through sufficient arguments and reasoning), and responsiveness (exposure to heterogeneous viewpoints), while platform affordances like entry barriers, content capacity, social networks, and interactional feedback in turn affect the presence and impact of …

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

This recognises that reality is not black and white, but that individuals may have different levels of affiliation towards a variety of political parties or positions; it measures the individual’s level of affiliation towards both poles of several possible scales of affiliation. These can then be …

The Wednesday at IAMCR 2024 starts with a paper by Yiming Liu, whose interest is in the interplay between moralised discussion and group polarisation. She begins by noting that deliberation within a structured moral framework can effectively reduce polarisation; morality can therefore be part of the solution to group polarisation.

The mechanism here is that a position that an individual would not normally support is framed in a way that is consistent with their moral values, and thereby fosters consensus. But a moral appeal is not always productive: it can also introduce a binary distinction between good and bad, right …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Constanza Ortega Gunckel, whose interest is in the coverage of the Chilean wildfires in 2024. Chile regularly experiences such fires in February, but the 2024 fires were exceptional in their extent and death toll; this also increased Chileans’ need for information.

Social media – and especially also Instagram – were especially critical here, and Instagram users also posed questions towards the media to better understand what was going on here. The present project examined such news coverage and user comment in Instagram from the perspective of a dramatic curve in the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on the propaganda of tomorrow. How might we democratise AI, and what does it mean for political systems?

In particular, what about AI systems that have been trained to appear human, and perhaps even to mimic real, historical humans: there is a long history of the preservation of real people’s traces, and these are increasingly also available in digital form; such traces can be used to train generative AI to produce content which resembles the traces of real persons.

Indeed …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is the excellent Rita Gsenger, whose focus is on the adaptive conspiracy ideation of online cults like QAnon. QAnon is a conspiratorial movement that combines several elements, centred on the elusive figure of ‘Q’ who posts occasional cryptic information drops on the 4chan message board, claiming US government insider knowledge.

The central claim here is that the world is secretly governed by a group of influential people who drink children’s blood, and there is an argument that QAnon can be understood as a cult: a novel social system emerging from secular or …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiaohao He, whose interest is in ‘news finds me’ perceptions and its relationship with news efficacy perceptions. She begins, unfortunately, by highlighting the now debunked concept of ‘echo chambers’, and points out that existing studies of this often neglect news consumption practices – not least, the process of passive news consumption where individuals do not actively seek news, but instead rely on peers and algorithms for their information. Individuals with higher levels of passivity in news engagement tend to be more likely to believe in disinformation and have lower level …

Up next at IAMCR 2024 are Virpi Salojärvi and Teija Waaramaa, whose interest is in the presence of Finnish legacy media on TikTok. Their move to explore this platform is part of a longer trajectory of journalistic transformation with the growing use of digital and social media technologies; this has also meant a greater incorporation of affective elements into journalistic coverage.

The present study focusses on the form and not the content of Finnish media’s TikTok uses. There is still relatively high trust in institutional media in Finland; TikTok has become a primary news source for younger generations, and the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Margaret Ng, whose interest is in the transition of journalists to other platforms following the enshittification of Twitter by Elon Musk. Twitter had been crucial to journalism for years, but after his takeover Musk began to suspend the accounts of various journalists who had offended his fragile ego; many journalists responded by sharing their Mastodon or other contact details, and saying they would leave Twitter – but did this actually happen, and how are journalists now using other social media platforms?

This project examined the activities of some 861 journalists on …

The second day at IAMCR 2024 starts with Jingxuan Gao, whose interest is in news on Weibo. She describes this as the newsification of social media, as the platform is becoming more important as a source of news for Chinese users. Weibo is broadly similar to Twitter, with some 598 million monthly active users.

Central to Weibo is Weibo Hot Search, which offers a list of trending topics on the platform and often packages entertainment information and soft news into a form of more serious news – newsifying them. This can be linked to the concept of infotainment, and may …