Politics

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

This event, and the information and misinformation that circulated around it …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

In China, the media environment means that this plays out somewhat differently: rumours may circulate on its social media platforms, but official institutions including police departments are often directly engaged in the discussion, and will provide updates on these stories directly on these platforms, and seek to suppress the distribution of further online …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Christian Schwarzenegger, whose focus is on the use of alternative information sources by people who no longer trust the mainstream media. Historically, the latter have been key pillars of society, providing citizens with a shared and reliable set of news – but ‘the’ public sphere is now multiple, and there is no longer a guarantee that everyone will encounter the same set of news stories.

With this increasing diversity and fragmentation, the role of journalism as a social institution is increasingly contested; this also manifests in significant distrust in their ability to provide …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

The project focussed on the recent Turkish local elections (before the re-runs of some of the contested polls), using focus groups, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. News users generally had very low trust in the news media, yet still accepted the news narratives being constructed …

Day two at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with another ‘fake news’ panel, and the first presenter is Seong Choul Hong. His focus is on the continuing controversy over global warming, which remains a target for mis- and disinformation. Even Donald Trump has described climate change as a ‘hoax’ in the past. The present project is interested in the third-person effect of such controversies. This effect appears to be stronger in countries with less content regulation, incidentally.

Generally, audiences tend to be very confident about their own ability to detect ‘fake news’, and believe such content to mainly affect others …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.

Homophily and antagonism drive such processes. But homophily is extremely common and not necessarily a problem in itself; some homophily is natural, and it only becomes a problem in extreme situations. The question is therefore whether homophily increases over time …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Asta Zelenkauskaite, whose interest is in micro- as well as macro-perspectives on influence in online contexts. This understands influence as non-linear and context-dependent, mediated by available media and information infrastructures and their affordances.

Asta’s study is focussing on the deviant spaces where influence is deliberately orchestrated and shaped by interested users. The study investigates the far-right social media platform Gab, and how its users make sense of the Russian trolling news frame. The platform is designed to cater to specific audiences and discourses, but is open to anyone to contribute …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

In Australia, for instance, there was substantial coverage of the ‘fake news’ debate in the U.S., sensitising voters to the issue; the use of ‘fake news’ as a label for news coverage particular politicians did not like; and outright lies about a ‘death tax’ purportedly …

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

These stories are what can be understood as Euromyths, representing a second-order semiological system …