Politics

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Baoning Gong, whose interest is in the social media activities of the German far right across a range of platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Gettr. This cross-platform focus is important because they all form part of a far-right online ecosystem, but single-platform studies still dominant the research literature. Far-right actors are well-known for moving between platforms if their accounts are banned from any one platform.

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.

I skipped the morning session this Saturday at the ICA 2024 conference as I was doing a live interview with Australian breakfast television about the current, ill-defined Parliamentary Inquiry into social media; more on that another time. So, I’m starting with a session on mis- and disinformation which begins with Sabina Mihelj, who has just published an open-access book on The Illiberal Public Sphere.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.

Up next in this ICA 2024 conference session is my excellent QUT colleague Katharina Esau, presenting a study on the news media framing of both mainstream and more disruptive climate protests in Germany and Australia. This included both the peaceful protests Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate as well as well as the actions of Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion that blocked traffic and staged symbolic protests in art galleries.

Here are the slides, and the liveblog continues below:

How the news media frame such protests matters. Frames influence public opinion and policy-makers, and policy-makers also seek to influence media framing – but media frames are difficult to investigate both qualitatively and quantitatively. Key questions here include whether there are problem statements, identified causes, blame attribution, proposed solutions, and other aspects.

The final ICA 2024 conference session I’m attending today is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Seungsu Lee. His interest is in partisan political communication, and he introduces the idea of like-minded and cross-cutting news media use and its relationship with political talk in homogeneous groups, and their effects on knowledge and polarisation.

The last speaker in this ICA 2024 conference is Francis Lee, whose focus is on the experience of media capture in Hong Kong. Typically, such media capture can involve ownership cooptation, advertising and other financial incentives, cognitive capture of journalists through constant interactions, legal measures and the criminalisation of journalistic activities, and even violence with impunity against journalists.

The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on democratic backsliding, and begins with Kate Wright; her focus is on state-led democratic backsliding and its relationship with the political capture of public service media organisations. This is difficult to study due to the problems with gaining access to such media organisations, especially as the political capture is taking place; at best, we might review this after the fact through interviews with journalists.

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Bingbing Zhang, whose focus is on perceptions of how political homophilous other people’s social networks are; such unrealistic perceptions could then lead to unfounded beliefs about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’.