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Politics

Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:58

New Approaches to Studying Hybrid Information Sourcing Practices

Politics | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Henri Mütschele, whose focus is on the interplay between traditional and social media in positional polarisation. What are the opinion dynamics in networked publics? This project focusses on positional or ideological polarisation, two concepts which are often used synonymously, and sees polarisation as a process in which positional distances between two entities are growing.

Such polarisation need not be symmetrical between the groups involved, and can be measured along two dimensions: along a left-right political scale and along a GAL-TAN scale that examines the political values of …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:56

Exploring the Connections between Journalism and Authoritarianism

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speaker in this P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is Ruth Moon, whose focus is on the role of journalists as authoritarian actors. Journalists have an important democratic role to play, but this is complicated when they work within authoritarian regimes, and democracy can decline even in countries where there is relatively high media freedom. Further, of course, ‘media’ is not a monolithic entity: media are themselves diverse and have various understandings of and approaches to democracy.

This means that we need to unpack the idea of ‘free media’ and examine the ways in which journalistic …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:54

Analysing Hizbullah Propaganda Strategies on Telegram and TV

Politics | Government | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference | Television |

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 …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:52

Interconnections between Problematic Information and Polarisation

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Giada Marino, presenting outcomes from the Italian I-POLHYS project led by Laura Iannelli which researched polarisation in hybrid media’s systems. A key focus of the project was on the potential interconnections between problematic information and mass polarisation; it began with a systematic literature review on these connections, which focussed on some 68 relevant articles (out of a much larger number that used these terms as buzzwords but did not operationalise them in any rigorous way, or confused them with other concepts) …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:49

Mapping the Literature on Populism

Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speakers at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference are my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard and Samantha Vilkins, presenting the emerging findings from an ongoing literature review of the concept of populism, continuing on from our review of the polarisation concept. Contrary to polarisation, populism is rather more clearly defined, with works by Mudde and Laclau emerging as particularly central if somewhat competing definitions.

These variously define populism as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde) and discursive opposition between the elites and the people (Laclau); such definitions have been applied to populist phenomena in media, medicine, religion, and other …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:47

Understanding Propaganda as a Social Process

Politics | Government | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Christian Baden, whose focus is on propaganda a as social process. Much of the work on propaganda remains very technical, and there is a need to move beyond this; propaganda is now again a major topic in research, with work having increased substantially since the mid-2010s. But it should not be equated simplistically with mis- and disinformation or ‘fake news’, or addressed only through fact-checks; this alone is not going to work.

False information is only a small part of propaganda: propaganda is systemic, disseminated by actors …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:45

Tech Firms and Their Poor Performance as Democratic Gatekeepers

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The third speaker in this opening plenary at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the great Daniel Kreiss, who shifts our focus to the role of tech firms in the context of democratic challenges. They may be seen as ‘democratic gatekeepers’, potentially playing a crucial role in keeping anti-democratic leaders and parties from power. Democracies are saved when there are strong political institutions to save them, but these institutions need to include media organisations and platforms as well.

Journalists are ‘civil gatekeepers’, then, who communicate ideas to the public about what is and is not democratic; when …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:42

Defining the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

I’ve stepped in as the presenter of the second paper in this opening session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference – unfortunately my colleague Katharina Esau, who was meant to present today, has fallen ill. The work we are presenting here is one of the early conceptual outcomes of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship on partisanship and polarisation, and both explores the concept of polarisation as current literature from a variety of fields describes it, and outlines five key symptoms of what we define as destructive polarisation that require further scholarly attention and empirical analysis.

Breaking Points …
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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:39

Reconceptualising Counter-Knowledge Orders

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig. His work is usually on mis- and disinformation, and he is interested in the underlying conditions of the digital knowledge society which supported the emergence of such information (dis)orders. His key concept here is the idea of counter-knowledge orders, with particular focus on the far right.

In contemporary society, falsehood is identified as a ‘disorder’ …

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Snurb — Tuesday 25 June 2024 20:54

"What Else Are They Talking About?": A Large-Scale Longitudinal Analysis of Misinformation Super-Spreader Communities on Facebook (ICA 2024)

Politics | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | ICA 2024 |
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