Politics

p>The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Frederik Henriksen, whose focus is on the transformation of far-right political activities on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The far-right shifted the focus of its activities during this time, and joined forces with other anti-systemic actors, particularly pushing mis- and disinformation on the pandemic and the health measures implemented by governments to address it.

The present study sought to identify these discursive shifts in response to the pandemic, amongst far-right actors in Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden and across multiple social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Gab, VKontakte, Reddit …

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.

Baoning’s work explores the opportunity structures of these three platforms for far-right movements, then: the specific configurations of technological communicative, regulatory, economic, and user …

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.

Indeed, engagement with the Sweden Democrats’ social media activities is substantial; their accounts reach a large and especially young audience …

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. Illiberalism has been on the rise at a global level, eroding liberal democratic systems – but how is this different from the concept of populism?

Especially in Eastern Europe, trends are going well beyond populism …

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.

Affective polarisation in such a political system may also be associated with divergent patterns of news consumption, but may also be affected by partisan identity or policy preferences. The present study examines this through a two-wave survey …

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 …

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.

Conversely, partisan heterogeneity within the same local communities means that people are more likely to encounter cross-cutting political information and views, motivate them to seek additional information, have their partisan identities primed, and access political knowledge. This might be operationalised for instance by looking at …

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.

But not all such strategies are used in all countries where such media capture takes place, and governments may change their mix of these strategies over time. Their choice depends on local contexts (such as the exploitability of economic or legal systems …

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.

Existing autocracies are often born this way: this is the case for China or Iran, for instance; conversely, backsliding democracies like Turkey, Poland, or Israel experience a change in their democratic institutions. Singapore or Hong Kong, in turn, are something else and in between …

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.

The present study is in the unusual position of having been able to study the state capture of the Voice of America by the Trump administration both …