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The first speaker in the first paper session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Frans van der Sluis, whose focus is on information quality in information retrieval. Judging information quality is hard: often, there is an inherent uncertainty around truth, and a question about whether a statement can be reliably justified as true. Practices such as cherry-picking, bothsidesism, and framing exploit such uncertainties. Overall, then, information quality might mean any of accuracy, comprehensiveness, expertise, usefulness, bias, and more.

Search engines tend to objectify such quality, mostly by assessing relevance; Google also seeks to includes expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness factors, though …

After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

The final presentation in this final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhieh Lor, Jihyang Choi, and Jaehyun Lee, who introduce the idea of a virtuous circle between nerds, political efficacy, and political participation. However, such active citizenship has continued to evolve, and new forms of political engagement like hashtag activism have emerged in the meantime – so how do people engage with politics today? What is their political participation repertoire?

Such political participation may include offline and online participation, lifestyle politics, and selective issue-based participation; the repertoire encompassing these participation styles may vary widely from …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is the great Renee Barnes, with a paper on strategic political news avoidance. This is a comparative study between Australia and Singapore, but the paper today is about the Australian side. Political news is of critical importance, yet information overload, issue  fatigue, lack of media trust, emotional reactions to the news, a perception of low relevance and impact, and general indifference all contributing to news avoidance; there may also be a difference between intentional and unintentional news avoidance.

How do all these factors intersect with each other …

The next speaker in this final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Marco Dohle; his interest is in everyday political consumerism. This is generally defined as consumers use of the market as an arena for politics, in order to change market practices that are found to be ethically, ecologically, or politically questionable. This is a widely used form of political participation, and is often expressed through boycotts or ‘buycotts’.

Such activity has increased on recent decades, driven by one or more of four megatrends: globalisation, individualisation, value change, or digitalisation. Digital media use is often associated with …

The final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts with Xue Mi, Yang Yang, and Zhen Ran, who begin with an introduction to the platformisation of online communication in China; such platforms also actively collaborate with the Chinese government on political initiatives. Political exposure on Chinese social media platforms could have various effects; this paper explores exposure to information from the Communist Youth League, an organisation for elite youth of 14 to 28 years, in Province A.

The CYL has various mechanisms for connecting within members and broader audiences: coercion, where WeChat is used for membership payments and …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yoojin Chung, whose interest is in emotional contention in collective online co-viewing: watching the same show together across several locations, while also seeing each other’s faces and reactions. This can be facilitated for instance via platforms like Teleparty, previously known as Netflix Party, which is now used by some 20 million people worldwide and hosts some 700,000 co-viewing events per month.

Such collective experiences may be affected by social conformity, where participation patterns converge due to social peer pressure, and emotional contagion, where emotional expressions are …

The fourth speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jessica Kühn, whose focus is on adolescents’ egocentric networks on social media platforms. This draws on the qualitative network analysis method (QNA), which focusses on an individual’s network as an egocentric, personal network, and on the individual’s perceptions of that network as well as on the perceptions of their contacts.

This surfaces which network contacts matter to the central individual, how, and why, and helps us to analyse the embeddedness of individuals within their social environment. But it is a complex and work-intensive method – most …

The third paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Yishen Zhao, exploring inter generational differences in algorithmic perceptions, with a particular focus on low-carbon technologies. Climate change is now an urgent crisis, but different generations respond to climate issues in very different ways – including through their social media uses.

This study builds on the theory of planned behaviour, which suggests that social media use might influence low-carbon intentions; and on patterns of algorithm appreciation and algorithm aversion in social media use, which may also affect social media activity patterns. In combination, these provide …