Politics

The final presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Florian Primig, whose interest is in how we make sense of misinformation. He participated in an expert citizen council in Germany that explored the question of misinformation, which sparked him to rethink these concepts – we ought to try some critical introspection and consider the societal factors that have challenged the established knowledge order and enabled the emergence of counter-knowledge orders.

That emergence is not necessarily a bad thing; the primacy of knowledge has always been problematic. Instead of citizens we are now seen as life-long learners, and this requires us …

Up next in this final ICA 2024 conference session is Niklas Venema, whose focus is also on counterpublics. These have become a key concept for analysing polarised and fragmented communication environments in hybrid media systems, with the focus initially mainly on empowering counterpublics that support marginalised communities, while more recently we have also needed to theorise far-right counterpublics that require a further adaptation of this concept.

What is being studied under this term, then, and how it is conceptualised? The present study conducted a literature search of English and German articles between 2000 and 2023, identifying some 139 relevant articles …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Linjie Dai, whose interest is in affective counterpublics. His focus is especially on the experience of Chinese immigrants in the Chinese exclusion area of American politics.

The concept of affective publics emerges from a dissatisfaction with the Habermasian conceptualisation of the public sphere, which overemphasises rationality and sees affect and emotion as problematic. Even affect theory tends to ignore the role of race and racism in power relations and affect, however.

The experience of Chinese diasporic networks in the United States in the 19th and 20th century, well before the …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose interest is in the shaping of communication flows about Ukraine across English, French, and German communities. Such efforts are part of information warfare, aiming to win the battle for public opinion and perception; Russia, in particular, is employing state media and troll armies to disseminate its propaganda about the causes and progress of its war against Ukraine. More recently, this has also include nuclear threats, rhetoric, and diplomacy.

The present study examines this with a particular view to cross-platform content flows and time-series analysis of the distribution …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The focus here is on Twitter and YouTube, working with some 18 million tweets and 59,000 YouTube videos between 2012 and 2022 that contain the term ‘woke’ and its derivations. These were addressed through …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, whose interest is in visual political communication across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in Brazil in the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Visual affordances are critically important in political campaigning, and such affordances continue to change; this works differently across different platforms, and cross-platform and/or multi-platform studies are therefore also critically important.

The project gathered some 23,000 images from the three platforms during the two presidential campaigns, focussing on the two presidential candidates; it used the Google Vision API to identify features in these …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

, and starts with Ryan Moore. Past research has explored the impact of social media on access to mis- and disinformation sources, but remains somewhat inconclusive or very context- and platform-specific. Some of this is drawing on self-reporting; some on browsing data (where it usually focusses on direct referrals from social media platforms); a more indirect link has yet to be explored in full.

Here, social media posts may lead people to other places online that then lead …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Helena Rauxloh, exploring how conspiracy ideation explains general news consumption. This is part of the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten.

Engagement with news and current affairs has a very important democratic function, but engagement with niche and alternative media especially on the far right also exposes users to content that differs markedly from mainstream news content in style, editorial practices, business models, and strategic aims, while there are also considerable differences in approaches within such right-wing alternative media. Engagement with such media might especially also relate …

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Claire Wonjeong Jo, whose focus is on the effects of cross-cutting exposure – these are seen as including both a better-informed citizenry and greater attitude and affective polarisation, and/or no effects at all. Past research draws largely on survey data, and measure a range of attributes; but perhaps there is a way to observe the actual news use behaviours of participants that provides more direct empirical data.

This study compares such data for South Korea and the United States; it applies social judgment theory, expectation violation theory (which suggests that …