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Polarisation

Snurb — Thursday 17 July 2025 11:54

Conservative Moral Panics in the Media around the World

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Melanie Radue, whose interest is in moral panics and polarised discourses in Malaysia and Germany. This is in the context of a turn towards the conservative right in countries around the world, which often uses and fuels polarising discourses through moral panics, leading to democratic backsliding. What is the role of traditional media in such processes?

The concept of moral panics helps us to understand how certain issues become identified and intensified in media discourse: moralised discourses have long been understood as intensifying polarised narratives; they …

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Snurb — Wednesday 16 July 2025 19:05

Social Media in the 2024 Kenyan Youth Protests

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Dorothy Njoroge, whose focus is on youth protests in Africa – these have been occurring around the world over the past decades, although African protests have been less visible in global media coverage than similar events in America, Asia, or Europe.

Africa has a very substantial youth population, but very limited socio-economic perspectives for its youth; they are politically marginalised, in a stage of ‘waithood’ where adulthood is suspended due to a lack of economic opportunities, but also better-educated and more technologically literate than earlier generations …

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Snurb — Wednesday 16 July 2025 19:01

The Shady Megafon Group Orchestrating Pro-Regime Influencers in Hungary

Politics | Government | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Kata Horváth, whose focus is on political influencer videos in the 2024 Hungarian elections. Hungary has now backslid into authoritarianism, and its mainstream media system have been captured by political interests aligned with the Fidesz party; the social media environment is also severely affected by hostile narratives from disinformation influencers, however.

Hostile narratives are designed to create an enemy figure that provides a target for social frustrations, reinforce polarisation, and distract from real issues. Social media advertising is also dominated by the Fidesz party, in part …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 19:21

Negative Online Political Advertising in India

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

And the final speaker at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is Nisha Singh, whose focus is on negative online political advertisements in India, especially in the context of elections. Elections are critical to democratic processes, and enable the people to voice their concerns to politicians; they also educate the public about democratic and political processes and stimulate political discourse.

Advertising has long been central to election processes, but the rise of digital advertising has transformed this, and enabled new campaigning approaches; this is no different in India. The rapid uptake of social media in India has further …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 19:20

Effects of Ideology on COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy

Politics | Government | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next presenter in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yujie Zhong, whose interest is in attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccinations. Political ideology influences public confidence in science; media coverage affects this, and the spread of misinformation, not least also via social media, further exacerbates it. This can then lead to substantial public health concerns, like widespread vaccine hesitancy.

Specific factors here may be public confidence in vaccine scientists, satisfaction with public health officials, and concern about false and misleading information. This study explored this through a multi-wave survey of some 10,000 American respondents during the COVID-19 …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 19:19

Deepfakes in Pakistani Political Discourse

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Maham Sufi, whose focus is on misinformation and deepfakes in Pakistan. Deepfakes are AI-generated synthetic media, and their realism creates a substantial potential for audiences to be misinformed; however, image manipulation has long been a feature of political misinformation well before the emergence of AI image generation technologies.

Pakistan represents a hybrid regime with weak political parties that rely on the support of other elements of the establishment – not least the military. Image manipulation has a history here, directed at various leading politicians; this has …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 19:18

Factors in the Perception of the Ukraine War on Chinese Social Media

Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The second presenter in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuheng Wang, whose focus is on war misinformation. This centres especially on perceptions of the Ukraine conflict amongst Chinese Internet users, which have caused substantial splits and controversies.

Misinformation surrounding the war has been widespread, partly because – unusually – there was limited censorship of official information, enabling users to accumulate knowledge and form opinions about the war more freely than is usually the case. Nonetheless, users might also believe misinformation about the war more readily if it aligns with their own political views, and an …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 19:18

The ‘China Factor’ of Misinformation in Taiwanese Politics

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final session on this second day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on mis- and disinformation, and begins with Chia-Shin Lin. His focus is on misinformation during Taiwanese elections, which he says is prevalent in part due to the ‘funny’ relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. This is part of a broader  ‘China factor’ of political pressure and interference in other countries’ political processes, and similar to the way that Russia and other problematic regimes also interfere elsewhere. How do older Taiwanese voters perceive the circulation of misinformation through instant messaging, then, especially during the 2024 presidential …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 17:11

Exploring the Use of LLMs in News Content Coding

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Artificial Intelligence | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting on the methodology of our ongoing analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media. This explores patterns of polarisation within journalistic content, but polarisation is not particularly well-defined in the literature, so we have developed the concept of destructive polarisation as an approach to defining when polarisation becomes problematic.

There is no clear information on how polarised the Australian media landscape is. Therefore, this project examines climate change coverage across some 26 Australian news outlets from the mainstream to the …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 17:10

Humour Styles in Climate Change Memes on Reddit

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Nadezhda Ozornina, whose focus is on the use of humorous Internet memes in fighting the climate crisis. Climate change has a comparatively low news value overall, outside of concrete crises, and humour has the potential to break through where news reporting itself does not; how are memes deployed in climate discourse, then?

There is no unified definition of Internet memes, but broadly they contain text, image, and/or video content that reproduce pop-cultural references and require contextual knowledge for a full understanding. Humour has always been present …

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Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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