‘Fake News’

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.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Victoria Chen, whose interest is in the influence of political misinformation in Taiwan. There are frequent presidential, parliamentary, and mid-term elections in Taiwan, and political misinformation about political parties is common. This manipulates public opinion, and can lead to polarisation and unconscious bias – the key question here is how people believe in and deal with such misinformation.

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.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is April Zhou, whose focus is on visual bias in Hong Kong fact-checkers’ gatekeeping processes. Fact-checking is of course one major response to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, and many fact-checkers have established strategies for the selection and investigation of problematic claims that require fact-checking. Such standardised approaches also serve to legitimise fact-checking organisations, and they can be understood as a kind of gatekeeping practice.

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.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Hong Li, whose interest is in ‘grey actors’ in online public opinion. The case study here is the ‘Internet water army’: a group of users who are paid to post online comments on Chinese social media platforms in order to promote vested interests. This is an astroturfing effort for public relations and media manipulation, and has become a major social media industry in China.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Ferruh Yılmaz, whose interest is in far-right strategies for dealing with Critical Race Theory. He begins by noting the differences between culture and policy: people attach themselves to broader political and social identities at least as much as they do to good policies on specific issues.

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 post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Christian Baden, who begins by noting that propaganda has become a substantially growing concern again in recent years. Propaganda is more than just ‘fake news’, of course: it may provide actual facts, but out of context or with a biased spin, for example, and false information is often only used around the margins to enhance the propagandistic effect and establish epistemic authority.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lin Pan, whose interest is in investigative journalism in the social media age in China. She highlights the issue of mis- and disinformation on social media, which is a problem in China too, but notes that the impact of this problem on investigative reporting has yet to be fully understood.