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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 …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Chen-ling Hung, whose focus is on Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan during the presidential election on 13 January 2024. Given its exposed position at the frontier between democracy and autocracy, Taiwan is most targetted by foreign disinformation attacks, yet remains a democratic country with the highest level of press freedom in Asia; there is considerable social awareness of disinformation challenges.

This study examined the means and themes of Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan, and the responses to this from Taiwanese society. It centrally builds on the concept of democratic resilience …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Victoria Chen, whose interest is in the influence of political misinformation in Taiwan. There are frequent presidential, parliamentary, and mid-term elections in Taiwan, and political misinformation about political parties is common. This manipulates public opinion, and can lead to polarisation and unconscious bias – the key question here is how people believe in and deal with such misinformation.

Fact-checking is one response to this, but can also produce backfire effects or a continued influence effect of misinformation. Backfire effects here mean that correction of misinformation only strengthens the convictions of those …

The third presenter in this IAMCR 2024 session is Joanne Kuai, whose interest is in LLM-powered chat bots and search engines. There is a considerable shift now underway in search: instead of presenting a list of search results, search engines are gradually moving towards the presentation of a summary of the search topic, with references attached. This is true for Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Baidu search, and especially important as more than half the world’s population participates in elections in 2024.

This project focussed on results from Microsoft Copilot on the Taiwanese presidential election earlier in 2024. In particular …

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 …

The final IAMCR 2024 session for today is in disinformation and polarisation, and starts with Ivan Paganotti’s presentation on institutional communication by the leading candidates’ campaign Websites in the 2022 Brazilian election. In particular, he is interested in whether and how they tried to respond to electoral disinformation, and whether they had policies to curtail such disinformation once in office.

Data collection focussed especially on the period between the first and second rounds of the election, and examined any attempts at fact-checking electoral disinformation as well as responses to the federal administration’s social media guidelines.

The Lula and PT campaign episodically attempted to contest every new piece of what it considered to be false information, and also structurally debated the overall impact of disinformation on the political process. But its own efforts to promote ‘fact-checks’ of false information largely focussed on amplifying the responses from partisan trade unions and other organisations that were close to its own political interests.

The Bolsonaro and PL campaign avoided any discussion of disinformation; the term did not appear on the PL Website, and Bolsonaro himself did not have a Website of his own (only social media accounts). Bolsonaro only generally complained about being the victim of various ‘lies’ by his opponents, deflecting criticism directed at him and questioning the very existence of ‘fake news’ as a meaningful category.

Neither of these two strategies are especially productive; neither make a meaningful contribution to the fight against mis- and disinformation. They also do not align with the federal guidelines against disinformation published by the previous Rousseff and Bolsonaro administrations.

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 …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Jintao Zhang, whose interest is in the Chinese government’s social media crisis response to the Zhengzhou rainstorm. This occurred in July 2021, and resulted in substantial damage and loss of life.

How did the Chinese government use social media, and especially Weibo, during this crisis? What communication strategies did it adopt, and why? How were these influenced by the nature of authoritarian governance in China? This study explored these questions by exploring the activities of some 73 accounts that operated at four level of governance, and coded these for their approach …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiting Tong, whose interest is in the rhetorical and political community JianZheng in China. She begins with a metaphor of biological community organisms like the Aspen trees in Utah, which are connected by their roots and form one large organism.

JianZheng is similarly a rhetorical community that is bounded together by shared discursive processes (metaphors, analogies, satires) that play an endless process of hide-and-seek with the Chinese state. This is an ongoing process, even though current research on such processes tends to take a very event-based, limited view – there is …

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Zaneera Malik, whose focus is on the use of social media as a strategic political communication tool in the fragile democracy of Pakistan. The focus here is especially on the PTI party, led by former cricket star Imran Khan, which lost the February 2024 election.

PTI won the 2018 elections and Khan became Prime Minister, but he lost office in 2022, and has been mired in political and legal controversy every since. Worse yet, PTI lost its election symbol, the cricket bat: because of limited literacy rates in Pakistan, each party …