Journalism

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system …

The next speaker at the final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is the excellent Helena Rauxloh, with a paper on radical climate protests. Just recently, for example, the Just Stop Oil protest group recently defaced the Stonehenge standing stones, and received some very negative news headlines for this action – yet many of the headlines covering these protests did not even identify what these protests were about. Such radical protests can be compared against more conventional and largely non-disruptive protests like Fridays for Future.

These protests engage with journalism as an arena for and driver of polarisation …

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Henri Mütschele, whose focus is on the interplay between traditional and social media in positional polarisation. What are the opinion dynamics in networked publics? This project focusses on positional or ideological polarisation, two concepts which are often used synonymously, and sees polarisation as a process in which positional distances between two entities are growing.

Such polarisation need not be symmetrical between the groups involved, and can be measured along two dimensions: along a left-right political scale and along a GAL-TAN scale that examines the political values of …

The next speaker in this P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is Ruth Moon, whose focus is on the role of journalists as authoritarian actors. Journalists have an important democratic role to play, but this is complicated when they work within authoritarian regimes, and democracy can decline even in countries where there is relatively high media freedom. Further, of course, ‘media’ is not a monolithic entity: media are themselves diverse and have various understandings of and approaches to democracy.

This means that we need to unpack the idea of ‘free media’ and examine the ways in which journalistic …

It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig. His work is usually on mis- and disinformation, and he is interested in the underlying conditions of the digital knowledge society which supported the emergence of such information (dis)orders. His key concept here is the idea of counter-knowledge orders, with particular focus on the far right.

In contemporary society, falsehood is identified as a ‘disorder’ …