The final presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Florian Primig, whose interest is in how we make sense of misinformation. He participated in an expert citizen council in Germany that explored the question of misinformation, which sparked him to rethink these concepts – we ought to try some critical introspection and consider the societal factors that have challenged the established knowledge order and enabled the emergence of counter-knowledge orders.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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. That stack drew on that list to gather public posts from Facebook’s CrowdTangle data service between 2016 and 2022 (some 42 million of them, from around 918,000 public pages and groups); identify the 1,000 most prominent pages and groups sharing problematic information; gather all of their posts during these years, independent of whether they contained problematic information or not (some 70 million from the 953 still available public pages and groups); and examine – through topic modelling and practice mapping – what else they talked about.

Slides are here, and more live-blogging below:

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.