Politics

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.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sujin Choi, presenting a stochastic actor-oriented modelling of shared-issue networks and personal news curation behaviours. The focus here is especially on issue publics, which pay particular attention to specific issues; this reflects the attention economy. But how do such issue publics come to be?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Harry Yan, whose begins by noting the increase of animosity and affective polarisation against opposing parties in the United States. What role do mass media play in this context? We already know that greater Internet use in itself is not to blame here: this has been shown by a range of studies already. More complex explanations need to be found.

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Megan Brown, whose focus is on the impact of the closure of the Twitter API on public-interest research. The discontinuation of Twitter’s Academic API was announced in February 2023, and remaining APIs are priced exorbitantly and outside the reach of publicly-funded researchers; this has severely affected any further research on the platform.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Darian Harff, whose interest is in the political topics covered by social media influencers in Germany and Flanders. Social media influencers run popular social media accounts and have become well-known because of their content specialties, but some occasionally also address political topics. This can be consequential in affecting public opinion especially amongst younger audiences, but is also problematic because they often have no formal political expertise.

The next session of the ICA 2024 conference that I’m in starts with Christian Pipal, whose interest is in political communication and viewer engagement on TikTok. He begins by noting the use of TikTok by the Austrian presidential candidate (and subsequently president) in Austria, Alexander van der Bellen, who both announced his candidacy there and posted the requisite dancing videos.