The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

, and starts with Ryan Moore. Past research has explored the impact of social media on access to mis- and disinformation sources, but remains somewhat inconclusive or very context- and platform-specific. Some of this is drawing on self-reporting; some on browsing data (where it usually focusses on direct referrals from social media platforms); a more indirect link has yet to be explored in full.

Here, social media posts may lead people to other places online that then lead …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Helena Rauxloh, exploring how conspiracy ideation explains general news consumption. This is part of the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten.

Engagement with news and current affairs has a very important democratic function, but engagement with niche and alternative media especially on the far right also exposes users to content that differs markedly from mainstream news content in style, editorial practices, business models, and strategic aims, while there are also considerable differences in approaches within such right-wing alternative media. Engagement with such media might especially also relate …

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms. To do so, however, also would enable us to better understand the cross-platform network of single-platform publics, and thereby the broader media ecosystem.

Information sharing ecosystems can be defined in various ways; here, they are defined by a …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Damiano Spina, who begins by highlighting the current challenges to the global information environment. In the IPIE survey of disinformation experts, politicians, social media platforms, and governments were seen as the most problematic sources of mis- and disinformation.

Computational methods are critical to addressing these problems. They can assist in fact-checking by engaging in claim detection and assessing check-worthiness, supporting evidence retrieval, and enabling veracity and truthfulness classification. But they can also assist in the reporting and dissemination of fact-checks. This does not remove the role of the …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Giada Marino, presenting some of the work of the Vera.ai research project. Responding to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, the project focusses especially on the coordinated communication networks that share such content in order to influence and manipulate social media audiences, and has developed a content-agnostic tool that monitors the activities of identified problematic accounts.

This currently works with CrowdTangle data, and is therefore under threat from the impending closure of the CrowdTangle data. Monitoring lists of problematic accounts derived from Meta alerts, it gathers up to …

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, who shifts our attention to the dissemination of verified false content on Facebook in the EU (and UK). This seeks to examine also the patterns of engagement with such content (rather than mere posting), and to do so draws on the Facebook URL Shares dataset.

The URL Shares dataset covers all URLs shared on Facebook that were shared more than 100 times on the platform, and adds monthly exposure and engagement data for some 48 countries and broad age groups and gender categories …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The final speaker in this session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the fabulous Annett Heft, whose focus is on patterns and dynamics of conspiracy theories (as part of the Neovex project), and especially on how these spread from the fringes to more mainstream visibility, not least also via social media.

Every digital platform shapes the dissemination of conspiracy theories in different ways, depending on its specific communicative affordances, and of course these platforms are also interconnected and integrated into a multi-platform communicative environment. How do the linguistic styles of conspiracist communication differ across platforms, then, and how …

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

What circulates here might be misinformation (claims that counter the currently available evidence, intentionally or not); selective information choices; and purposeful, fabricated disinformation. Typical disinformation campaigns might place deceptive information in an otherwise …