Journalism

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Iris Baas, whose interest is in the self-identity of Dutch Twitter users who share the news. Twitter is (even now, following its enshittification) a key platform especially for news consumption in the Netherlands, and who is sharing news on the platform is therefore centrally important. Are there district groups of such users, then – and what news do they share?

This project worked with the Twitter bios of such news-sharing users to determine patterns in their identities; it drew on some 400,000 tweets from 2021 (that were still online, from …

The next speaker at the ICA 2024 conference is Jennifer Ihm, who begins by outlining key interests in news-sharing research: such content has been studied for its information value as well as its viral dissemination. But how do social media users assess the value and relevance of the news being shared? There might be two types of self-presentational value in news-sharing: based on self-constructive motivations, or based on audience-pleasing motivations (relational, informational, or entertainment aspects may all contribute here).

Issue relevance in news articles may be at the personal, audience, or societal level, then: personal relevance is likely to be …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on news-sharing, and starts with Shu-Chu Sarrina Li, whose focus is on Facebook, Instagram, and Line in Taiwan. Social media are very popular in Taiwan – some 91% are regular Line users, 85% use Facebook, and 65% use Instagram, and half of all Taiwanese use some of these platforms to use and share news as well.

This paper approaches these practices through niche theory, which encourages scholars to explore media resource utilisation by identifying the breadth of the niches that such media address, and the overlap between the niches addressed by …

The next presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Biying Wu-Ouyang, presenting a systematic review of research on cross-cutting exposure. Social media users are constantly exposed to cross-cutting views, and this can increase information exposure and thus depolarise opinions, but also increase polarisation by confronting them with out-group perspectives; there may also be no effect whatsoever.

What exactly happens here depends on a range of factors – such as sources, modality, or intentions of the cross-cutting exposure. Other attributes (measurement, design and sampling strategies, and local contexts) may also affect the results of individual studies.

The present study is reviewing …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with the great Helena Rauxloh. Her paper emerges from the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten, which builds on longitudinal Web tracking and survey data from some 4,000 participants in Germany. The key concept in this study is political efficacy, which is the feeling that political action has an impact on political processes. This divide into internal and external efficacy as experienced by individuals, and such efficacy mediates news exposure and political engagement. It is thus a precondition for political participation.

Another aspect to consider here is …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Damiano Spina, who begins by highlighting the current challenges to the global information environment. In the IPIE survey of disinformation experts, politicians, social media platforms, and governments were seen as the most problematic sources of mis- and disinformation.

Computational methods are critical to addressing these problems. They can assist in fact-checking by engaging in claim detection and assessing check-worthiness, supporting evidence retrieval, and enabling veracity and truthfulness classification. But they can also assist in the reporting and dissemination of fact-checks. This does not remove the role of the …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.

Affective polarisation in such a political system may also be associated with divergent patterns of news consumption, but may also be affected by partisan identity or policy preferences. The present study examines this through a two-wave survey …

Up next in this ICA 2024 conference session is my excellent QUT colleague Katharina Esau, presenting a study on the news media framing of both mainstream and more disruptive climate protests in Germany and Australia. This included both the peaceful protests Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate as well as well as the actions of Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion that blocked traffic and staged symbolic protests in art galleries.

Here are the slides, and the liveblog continues below:

How the news media frame such protests matters. Frames influence …

The final ICA 2024 conference session I’m attending today is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Seungsu Lee. His interest is in partisan political communication, and he introduces the idea of like-minded and cross-cutting news media use and its relationship with political talk in homogeneous groups, and their effects on knowledge and polarisation.

Conversely, partisan heterogeneity within the same local communities means that people are more likely to encounter cross-cutting political information and views, motivate them to seek additional information, have their partisan identities primed, and access political knowledge. This might be operationalised for instance by looking at …