‘Fake News’

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.

Such users are ‘grey actors’ who manipulate public opinion; they cannot be easily distinguished from ordinary users since they often are ordinary users making some money on …

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.

Far-right populism builds on this by weaponising an affective rhetorical strategy: it promotes moral panics about cultural and moral issues that channels people’s diffused anxieties into a sense of unity against social elites, which transforms their ontological vision of society into a perception of …

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 …

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.

Propaganda is therefore defined here as strategically planned public communication on political issues that claims a monopoly of truth and delegitimises dissent. This extends well beyond specific contexts …

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.

This study therefore explored the impact of disinformation on Chinese investigative reporting. It drew on a hierarchy of influences model, where routine and organisational influences have stronger impacts on individuals than broader social and societal settings. The project conducted interviews with …

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

The final presenters at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference this evening are my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Tim Graham, presenting a pilot project leading into a larger research project on ‘dark political communication’: expanding from a narrow focus on disinformation to examine the problematic communication strategies of political elites for political gain. One strategy in such communication is disinformative attacks: here, political actors make specific false claims regarding their political opponents, and manage to get these covered by journalists because journalism has a negativity bias, conflict bias, and/or an immediacy and timeliness bias. Such attacks seem …

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Jing Zeng, whose focus is on Trumpism in the online Sinosphere. There was a lot of public animosity between presidents Trump and Xi during Trump’s term in office, but there also appears to be a surprising amount of support for Trump both within China as well as in the Chinese diaspora around the world. Chinese-Americans were one of the groups of Asian-Americans with the greatest amount of support for Trump, in fact.

The e-commerce platform Taobao sells Buddha figures with Trump’s face, for example; such …

And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.

But the understanding of social media communication also requires a perception of the local context: in a region beset with civil and other …