I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media. In other words, there are plenty of sociotechnical imaginaries about social media at the moment, and perhaps social media are in a midlife crisis, or past their honeymoon phase.

How do …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

Twitch is not a conventional news provider, but news is nonetheless present there: it provides a platformed information space for news content, too. The quality of news has always been contingent, dynamic, and contested, and Twitch should therefore not be dismissed out of hand as a space for the news – however, journalistic boundary work continues to place news on Twitch …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yu Ling, whose focus is on news acceleration in China. This relates to the idea that news time in journalism has accelerated; this is part of the broader social acceleration in late modernity, and may be in conflict with the human pursuit of a good life: it threatens the resonance relationship between humans and the world they live in.

Journalism has a role to play in this; social mediatisation means that journalism has replaced religion and contributes to alienation and relationlessness. By contrast, good journalism should serve as an information intermediary …

The second speaker at this IAMCR 2024 session is Lisa Waller, whose focus is on how Australian journalists have been converging institutionalised child sexual abuse in regional Australia, following a Royal Commission into such abuses. This takes the form of a poetic inquiry, which builds on transdisciplinary collaboration between journalism research and creative practice and enables a focus on the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life.

The work builds on 16 interviews with well-established and emerging journalists who covered the victim-survivor testimony of individuals in the regional Victorian town of Ballarat …

And the final day at IAMCR 2024 starts for me with a session on journalism research. The first presenter is the wonderful Eli Skogerbø, whose focus here is on the media coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the injustices perpetrated against the indigenous Sámi people in Norway. This work emerges from the Trucom research project, which importantly also involved Sámi researchers.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Norway operated from 2018 to 2023, and investigated the ‘Norwegianisation’ policies towards the indigenous Sámi people as well as the minority Kvens (or Norwegian Finns) and Forest Finns. Its explicit aim …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is April Zhou, whose focus is on visual bias in Hong Kong fact-checkers’ gatekeeping processes. Fact-checking is of course one major response to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, and many fact-checkers have established strategies for the selection and investigation of problematic claims that require fact-checking. Such standardised approaches also serve to legitimise fact-checking organisations, and they can be understood as a kind of gatekeeping practice.

How do fact-checkers select the claims they will address, then? Key factors are empiricism (claims must relate to facts, not opinions); objectivity (avoiding selection biases); and …

And the final speaker in this full session at IAMCR 2024 is Dorismilda Flores-Márquez, who shifts our focus to the presidential campaign in Mexico. This was the first time the election was a contest between two women candidates – a major step in the country.

The interest here is in the structuring of political rallies in a hybride media context. These are predominantly face-to-face activities, but also produced for mainstream and social media coverage, and the logics of these hybrid media contexts now shape their structure and designs.

The project explored this through ethnography and grounded theory; it performed participant …