After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

The final presentation in this final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhieh Lor, Jihyang Choi, and Jaehyun Lee, who introduce the idea of a virtuous circle between nerds, political efficacy, and political participation. However, such active citizenship has continued to evolve, and new forms of political engagement like hashtag activism have emerged in the meantime – so how do people engage with politics today? What is their political participation repertoire?

Such political participation may include offline and online participation, lifestyle politics, and selective issue-based participation; the repertoire encompassing these participation styles may vary widely from …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is the great Renee Barnes, with a paper on strategic political news avoidance. This is a comparative study between Australia and Singapore, but the paper today is about the Australian side. Political news is of critical importance, yet information overload, issue  fatigue, lack of media trust, emotional reactions to the news, a perception of low relevance and impact, and general indifference all contributing to news avoidance; there may also be a difference between intentional and unintentional news avoidance.

How do all these factors intersect with each other …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Melanie Radue, whose interest is in moral panics and polarised discourses in Malaysia and Germany. This is in the context of a turn towards the conservative right in countries around the world, which often uses and fuels polarising discourses through moral panics, leading to democratic backsliding. What is the role of traditional media in such processes?

The concept of moral panics helps us to understand how certain issues become identified and intensified in media discourse: moralised discourses have long been understood as intensifying polarised narratives; they …

The next speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Guolin Chen and Xialei Zhang, whose focus is on the global media landscape. Increasingly, we have seen the emergence of state-driven English-language networks, including CGTN from China, RT from Russia, TRT International from Turkey, etc. This goes beyond mere propaganda, which is too simplistic and broad a label; it represents a soft power agenda.

But how do such media construct their imagined communities, both at the national and global level – indeed, how do they advance beyond imagination and towards expressing their vision of these communities …

Because of the coffee queue I came in late to the Thursday morning session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, where Jan Miessler is already in full flight summarising structural functionalism. His overall aim here is to critique the systemic perspective on media systems that was popularised with the seminar work by Hallin and Mancini, which tends to neglect the social actors within the system, and presents a ‘real’ and ‘holistic’ perspective that is actually conjured by the authors.

But a holistic perspective means that nothing can be known, since there is no way to exhaustively describe a system …

My final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is on global conflicts, and starts with Nicole Marie Klevanskaya, whose focus is on Russian state-controlled and independent television reporting on acts of terrorism. This includes the 2024 terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall entertainment complex, which resulted in at least 140 deaths. This was Russia’s largest terror attack in years, and Putin quickly and incorrectly blamed Ukraine for it.

Russian media consists of independent and regime-critical journalists in exile, and state-controlled domestic media outlets that toe the official line. Studies on this media system often predate …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Hanye Yang, with a comparison of fact-checking operations in China and Hong Kong. Fact-checking has grown substantially in recent years, in response to the rise of mis- and disinformation; there is not a sizeable fact-checking sector in Asia too. But do western models of fact-checking apply here, especially in the context of non-democratic political systems and limited press freedom?

The difference between China and Hong Kong is interesting here, since their media systems diverged under British rule in Hong Kong but are perhaps converging again with …