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The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

This recognises that reality is not black and white, but that individuals may have different levels of affiliation towards a variety of political parties or positions; it measures the individual’s level of affiliation towards both poles of several possible scales of affiliation. These can then be …

The Wednesday at IAMCR 2024 starts with a paper by Yiming Liu, whose interest is in the interplay between moralised discussion and group polarisation. She begins by noting that deliberation within a structured moral framework can effectively reduce polarisation; morality can therefore be part of the solution to group polarisation.

The mechanism here is that a position that an individual would not normally support is framed in a way that is consistent with their moral values, and thereby fosters consensus. But a moral appeal is not always productive: it can also introduce a binary distinction between good and bad, right …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Constanza Ortega Gunckel, whose interest is in the coverage of the Chilean wildfires in 2024. Chile regularly experiences such fires in February, but the 2024 fires were exceptional in their extent and death toll; this also increased Chileans’ need for information.

Social media – and especially also Instagram – were especially critical here, and Instagram users also posed questions towards the media to better understand what was going on here. The present project examined such news coverage and user comment in Instagram from the perspective of a dramatic curve in the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nermine Aboulez, whose focus is on global reactions to the 2023 Israeli-Palestine war. The current war is of course only the latest escalating in a conflict that has been going on for more than 70 years; it began with Hamas’s surprise attack and kidnapping of Israelis, and escalated with the start of Israel’s still ongoing war in Gaza.

The conflict has been covered extensively in the media, and part of the focus here is especially on the US media. Media can play a role in escalating or deescalating conflicts, not least …

The second presenter in this IAMCR 2024 session is Hao Jiang, who begins his presentation like a news anchor. His interest is in the news media coverage of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the Philippines. This draws on the World Risk Society (not sure what this means), which influences how the UPI newspaper reports on the terrorist group.

This project conducted a content analysis of UPI’s coverage of the terrorists’ activities, exploring especially how these activities are labelled. They are described most often as extremists when they conduct kidnappings, but as terrorists when they engage in more …

The final session at IAMCR 2024 today starts with Yuxuan Wang, whose interest is in the journalistic coverage of the Russian war on Ukraine since the full-scale invasion in 2022. A particular focus here is on the increasing use of nuclear threats by Russian propaganda, and the way this has been addressed in journalistic coverage in the US, UK, and China.

This study explores this from a framing perspective, with particular attention to war and peace journalism frames. Peace journalism emphasises non-violent conflict resolution, while war journalism emphasises military conflict; these differences also come to the fore in the reporting …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Ferruh Yılmaz, whose interest is in far-right strategies for dealing with Critical Race Theory. He begins by noting the differences between culture and policy: people attach themselves to broader political and social identities at least as much as they do to good policies on specific issues.

Far-right populism builds on this by weaponising an affective rhetorical strategy: it promotes moral panics about cultural and moral issues that channels people’s diffused anxieties into a sense of unity against social elites, which transforms their ontological vision of society into a perception of …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on the propaganda of tomorrow. How might we democratise AI, and what does it mean for political systems?

In particular, what about AI systems that have been trained to appear human, and perhaps even to mimic real, historical humans: there is a long history of the preservation of real people’s traces, and these are increasingly also available in digital form; such traces can be used to train generative AI to produce content which resembles the traces of real persons.

Indeed …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Debadatta Chakraborty, whose focus is on the transnational authoritarianism of the Indian Hindutva movement. Indeed, the movement has been pushing for the replacement of the colonial name ‘India’ with the term ‘Bharat’, a traditional Hindu name for the country.

The Hindutva project is exemplified for instance by the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, which was built for an extraordinary amount of money on stolen land that previously belonged to a mosque that was burnt down by Hindu nationalists in the 1990s. The completion of the temple was celebrated by Hindutva activists …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is the excellent Rita Gsenger, whose focus is on the adaptive conspiracy ideation of online cults like QAnon. QAnon is a conspiratorial movement that combines several elements, centred on the elusive figure of ‘Q’ who posts occasional cryptic information drops on the 4chan message board, claiming US government insider knowledge.

The central claim here is that the world is secretly governed by a group of influential people who drink children’s blood, and there is an argument that QAnon can be understood as a cult: a novel social system emerging from secular or …