IAMCR 2023

The third speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session is Barbie Zelizer, whose interest is in the ways Cold War logic hides propaganda in democracies. Practices of obfuscation are now ever-present, but our discussion changes depending on the type of regime (autocratic, democratic, …) we are talking about.

Up next in this IAMCR 2023 session is Nelson Ribeiro, whose interest is in patterns of political propaganda. He begins by referencing Orwell’s 1984 and the approaches to fabricating the past and rewriting history that the book describes; these approaches are somewhat similar to the way that the Italian fascists and German Nazis rewrote the past – and in such a way that the lie was so big that ordinary people could not even conceive of it being fabricated.

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

And the final speaker in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Mavis Amo-Mensah, whose interest is in doctoral students’ research self-awareness following their thesis proposal defence. Most existing studies of such students focus mainly on their information-seeking behaviours and relationships with their supervisors, independent of discipline or location; the present study focussed instead specifically on communication students in Ghana, examining their research activities.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Franziska Thiele, whose focus is on what communication scholars are saying on Twitter, and on whether this reflects different styles in international research communities. The principal focus here is especially on the ICA and IAMCR communities on Twitter.

The third presentation in this hot IAMCR 2023 session is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on the discussion of generative visual AI (e.g. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) and its relationship to artists. There is a veritable media panic, but also a genuine discussion about how such generative AI tools are drawing on existing, copyrighted art for their creations.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vanessa Richter, whose interest is in the shaping of AI debates and trajectories on Twitter. Imaginaries of AI are still evolving, and involve a diverse set of stakeholders: industry, governments, NGOs, academia, and the media.

It is Monday, 8:30, the temperature is 25° already, and there is no aircon or ventilation to speak of, so this must be the first paper session at IAMCR 2023. The topic this morning is on artificial intelligence and Twitter, and we start with a paper by Mina Momeni, whose focus is on digital storytelling through Twitter bots.

My conferencing year continues with the IAMCR 2023 in a boiling Lyon, France – it’s hot here even by Australian standards. The conference opens with a keynote by Christian Fuchs, which I’ll try to liveblog (though frankly this proved a challenge when I last blogged one of his presentations at ECREA 2014; let’s see how we go today). More liveblogging from regular conference sessions to follow over the week, at any rate.