IAMCR 2023

The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Trisha Lin, whose focus is on health misinformation in the context of COVID-19. Such misinformation is damaging and highly politicised, and the present study examines this for the context of Taiwan’s polarised political system. The present study conducted a quantitative survey to examine the interplay between misinformation, polarisation, media literacy, and vaccination acceptance in Taiwan, therefore.

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.

The first session at IAMCR 2023 this hot Tuesday morning starts with Raül Nuevo Gascó, and his focus is on populism. But this term is being used in very different ways by different scholars as well as in mainstream media, and instead Raül is moving from an essentialist to a constructivist perspective, and from an inductive to a deductive approach. This accepts that populism can have different meanings; that these differ between different national contexts; and that these meanings are collectively constructed in each case.

And the final speaker for this session and this day at IAMCR 2023 is Aline Duelen, whose focus is on the use of AI in combatting disinformation. Disinformation is a major problem in online communication spaces today, of course, and there is some existing research that identifies factors that play a role in detecting disinformation – but these cannot easily be automated, as their application usually requires the application of critical thinking skills. The development of more automated systems therefore requires citizen co-creation approaches.

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is by Livia Gardía-Faroldi, who presents a comparative analysis of disinformation on social media across the UK, France, and Spain. Such a comparative study is necessary given the very different political and media environments across these countries. Do the audiences in these countries differ in their interest and trust in the news; their concern about fake news; and their use of social media for informational purposes?

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is An Nguyen, with a focus on pandemic news avoidance on social media in Vietnam. A key aspect of this research project, therefore, is its focus on a non-democratic society: pandemic news avoidance has been studied in some detail already for western democracies and their saturated media environments, but the focus on Vietnam is new. How does news avoidance work here?

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Ana Filipa Oliveira, whose interest is also in young people and the news. There is a sense that younger and older generations have very different relationships with the news, and this is expressed also in their divergent news consumption patterns; younger audiences tend to favour more autonomous, hands-on and creative approaches to knowledge acquisition, and are also more active media producers on their own terms. But what do they think news is, and how does this affect their news habits?

The final session on this first full day of IAMCR 2023 is on how audiences consume (or perhaps engage with) disinformation, and the first presenter is Hillel Nossek, with a focus on news consumption by Jewish youth in Israel. He describes this group as ‘newsers’: new news consumers. What characterises this group, then?

The final speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Beate Josephi, whose focus is on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Her interest is in the initial annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and the focus here is on how Russia argued its case at that point – in this case, through the coverage in the Russian weekly newspaper Argumenti i Fakti.