Politics

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on the propaganda of tomorrow. How might we democratise AI, and what does it mean for political systems?

In particular, what about AI systems that have been trained to appear human, and perhaps even to mimic real, historical humans: there is a long history of the preservation of real people’s traces, and these are increasingly also available in digital form; such traces can be used to train generative AI to produce content which resembles the traces of real persons.

Indeed …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Debadatta Chakraborty, whose focus is on the transnational authoritarianism of the Indian Hindutva movement. Indeed, the movement has been pushing for the replacement of the colonial name ‘India’ with the term ‘Bharat’, a traditional Hindu name for the country.

The Hindutva project is exemplified for instance by the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, which was built for an extraordinary amount of money on stolen land that previously belonged to a mosque that was burnt down by Hindu nationalists in the 1990s. The completion of the temple was celebrated by Hindutva activists …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is the excellent Rita Gsenger, whose focus is on the adaptive conspiracy ideation of online cults like QAnon. QAnon is a conspiratorial movement that combines several elements, centred on the elusive figure of ‘Q’ who posts occasional cryptic information drops on the 4chan message board, claiming US government insider knowledge.

The central claim here is that the world is secretly governed by a group of influential people who drink children’s blood, and there is an argument that QAnon can be understood as a cult: a novel social system emerging from secular or …

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Christian Baden, who begins by noting that propaganda has become a substantially growing concern again in recent years. Propaganda is more than just ‘fake news’, of course: it may provide actual facts, but out of context or with a biased spin, for example, and false information is often only used around the margins to enhance the propagandistic effect and establish epistemic authority.

Propaganda is therefore defined here as strategically planned public communication on political issues that claims a monopoly of truth and delegitimises dissent. This extends well beyond specific contexts …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Margaret Ng, whose interest is in the transition of journalists to other platforms following the enshittification of Twitter by Elon Musk. Twitter had been crucial to journalism for years, but after his takeover Musk began to suspend the accounts of various journalists who had offended his fragile ego; many journalists responded by sharing their Mastodon or other contact details, and saying they would leave Twitter – but did this actually happen, and how are journalists now using other social media platforms?

This project examined the activities of some 861 journalists on …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Dmitry Romanenko, whose interest is in the media portrayal of Ukraine in New Zealand media following Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. Western coverage of the war has tended to take a strongly pro-Ukrainian perspective, which is a substantial shift from the far more critical pre-invasion media coverage. Here, the focus is on the use of images in such coverage, which represent dominant narratives and can have a substantial effect on international relations.

This can be understood through Entman’s cascading activation paradigm; Dmitry examines this through a study of articles from …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Kerry McCallum, whose interest is in the media logics surrounding public inquiries into child abuse, focussing especially on the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, in 2013-17.

Media were a key player in making child sexual abuse in institutional settings in Australia public – but they can also reinforce public stigma and discriminatory policies. Public inquiries, in turn, can shift public discourse on critical social issues, but their non-public aspects of ‘quiet listening’ to the victims of survivors of abuse are just as critical; this needs …

The next session at IAMCR 2024 is on media framing, and we start with Henri Mütschele, whose interest is in the German media portrayals of the Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation protest movements in the ‘protest winter’ of 2022/23. Germany has a long tradition of climate protests, but these groups have very different approaches to their protests: from socially acceptable demonstrations to more radical and disruptive blockage actions.

In winter 2022/23, against the context of the European energy crisis brought on by the Russian war on Ukraine, there was a heightened rate of protests by such groups, and these …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session on Ukrainian cultural heritage narratives is Dmitry Romanenko, whose focus is on Chinese narratives on the Russian war against Ukraine.It has already been observed in some studies that Chinese media like the Global Times usually take a pro-Russian stance that’s justifies the war in Ukraine; however, an alternative perspective is that China’s public messaging is predominantly designed to promote its own, and not Russia’s, interests, and that it does not explicitly endorse the war. Whose narratives is China telling, then? What is their message, and can it be contested at an international …

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session on cultural and heritage narratives surrounding the war on Ukraine is Shalabh Chopra, who begins by highlighting the changes in global power structures; in this the newly multipolar world the Global South is not readily on the side of the west in major conflicts, and may therefore also be less sympathetic towards Ukraine in the current war.

This can also be observed for the case of India. India has a long history of non-alignment, and has had historically good ties with the USSR; it has engaged in diplomatic efforts surrounding the war …