Politics

The final speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Beate Josephi, whose focus is on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Her interest is in the initial annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and the focus here is on how Russia argued its case at that point – in this case, through the coverage in the Russian weekly newspaper Argumenti i Fakti.

A background to this event was the postponement of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU by then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in favour of a greater alignment with Russia, and the Euromaidan protests that ensued in …

The third speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session is Barbie Zelizer, whose interest is in the ways Cold War logic hides propaganda in democracies. Practices of obfuscation are now ever-present, but our discussion changes depending on the type of regime (autocratic, democratic, …) we are talking about. In autocracies, information disorder is equated with propaganda, and linked to a long-term history of government control of information; in democracies, information disorders are seen as a new phenomenon linked to disinformation, and related to current conditions of polarisation, populism, and digital technology.

But during the Cold War, conditions in media and …

Up next in this IAMCR 2023 session is Nelson Ribeiro, whose interest is in patterns of political propaganda. He begins by referencing Orwell’s 1984 and the approaches to fabricating the past and rewriting history that the book describes; these approaches are somewhat similar to the way that the Italian fascists and German Nazis rewrote the past – and in such a way that the lie was so big that ordinary people could not even conceive of it being fabricated.

Similarly, lies circulated in Western media during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s, and their endorsement by US Congress …

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

But how do such tactics leverage the machine learning and AI systems of online platforms, and use AI in their …

My conferencing year continues with the IAMCR 2023 in a boiling Lyon, France – it’s hot here even by Australian standards. The conference opens with a keynote by Christian Fuchs, which I’ll try to liveblog (though frankly this proved a challenge when I last blogged one of his presentations at ECREA 2014; let’s see how we go today). More liveblogging from regular conference sessions to follow over the week, at any rate.

Christian’s focus here is on explaining the challenges of digitalisation for humanity. This requires an understanding of the relationship between communication and the underlying economic structures, and …