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And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Michael Chan, whose interest is in cross-national misinformation belief and sharing patterns. Mis- and disinformation is a global pattern, but are the motivations for engaging with such content the same across countries? If not, what does the mean for countermeasures against such problematic information?

Cognitive drivers may be intuitive thinking (a lack of analytical thinking or deliberation), cognitive failures (neglecting source cues or counter-evidence), or illusory truth (familiarity, fluency, and cohesion); socio-affective drivers may be source cues, emotion, and worldviews. This paper focusses on the cognitive …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Hazel Kwon, who continues the COVID-19 mis- and disinformation theme. Such conspiracist claims often focussed on powerful actors (politicians and others), and this represents a reductionist worldview; these claims can have very direct material impacts on communities, for instance when they question the established science and promote vaccine hesitancy.

Some such conspiracy theories focussed directly on Bill Gates and his foundation’s work on vaccination; the present paper examines the superspreaders of such ideas on Twitter during the last three quarters of 2020. Tweets were linked to major …

It’s a suspiciously sunny Wednesday in London, so I must be at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, where I start by chairing a panel on mis-and disinformation. My excellent QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the first presenter, whose paper focusses on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. She starts with conspiracies around the role of Bill and Melinda Gates (and other philanthropists) in global crises – they are often targets of conspiracy theories which claim that they had a role in secret plots to create such crises.

Conspiracy theories can be understood as presenting webs of floating signifiers, enabling a politics …

The final speaker in this final session at IAMCR 2024 is, appropriately enough, outgoing IAMCR President Nico Carpentier, whose interest is in expert imaginings of the future of conflict and communication technologies. He begins by outlining the patterns of conflict in a very broad sense. Such conflict can be agonistic or antagonistic, and towards the antagonistic side there may be increasingly violent grey zone conflicts, armed conflicts, or hybrid conflicts – and the latter then also move beyond the realm of democratically acceptable conflicts.

Media play a critical role in all such conflicts, of course; media and communication technologies are …

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicholas Holm, whose interest is in the role of fun in the public sphere. In political communication, in fact, humour and laughter often appears out of place; in recent times, however, some playful and humorous elements have come to intrude into political discourse. How can we make sense of this?

This diverges very substantially from the staid, rational, serious Habermasian conceptualisation of the public sphere, which was always unrealistic and never properly realised. Indeed, the polity is not always especially interested in such boring forms of public debate, and instead indulges …

It’s been a busy week, but we’ve reached the final session of the IAMCR 2024 conference in Christchurch, which begins with a paper by Samiksha Koirala and Soumik Pal on the use of social media in political campaigning in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. They begin by noting the domination of South Asian politics by long-lived political dynasties; however, the emergence of social media as a campaigning space has begun to disrupt such structures.

This is also aided by growing Internet penetration and the widespread use of various social media platforms. Emerging political parties, especially also catering to younger voters, are …

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 …