Politics

The third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Maham Sufi, whose focus is on misinformation and deepfakes in Pakistan. Deepfakes are AI-generated synthetic media, and their realism creates a substantial potential for audiences to be misinformed; however, image manipulation has long been a feature of political misinformation well before the emergence of AI image generation technologies.

Pakistan represents a hybrid regime with weak political parties that rely on the support of other elements of the establishment – not least the military. Image manipulation has a history here, directed at various leading politicians; this has …

The second presenter in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuheng Wang, whose focus is on war misinformation. This centres especially on perceptions of the Ukraine conflict amongst Chinese Internet users, which have caused substantial splits and controversies.

Misinformation surrounding the war has been widespread, partly because – unusually – there was limited censorship of official information, enabling users to accumulate knowledge and form opinions about the war more freely than is usually the case. Nonetheless, users might also believe misinformation about the war more readily if it aligns with their own political views, and an …

The final session on this second day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on mis- and disinformation, and begins with Chia-Shin Lin. His focus is on misinformation during Taiwanese elections, which he says is prevalent in part due to the ‘funny’ relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. This is part of a broader  ‘China factor’ of political pressure and interference in other countries’ political processes, and similar to the way that Russia and other problematic regimes also interfere elsewhere. How do older Taiwanese voters perceive the circulation of misinformation through instant messaging, then, especially during the 2024 presidential …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting on the methodology of our ongoing analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media. This explores patterns of polarisation within journalistic content, but polarisation is not particularly well-defined in the literature, so we have developed the concept of destructive polarisation as an approach to defining when polarisation becomes problematic.

There is no clear information on how polarised the Australian media landscape is. Therefore, this project examines climate change coverage across some 26 Australian news outlets from the mainstream to the …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Nadezhda Ozornina, whose focus is on the use of humorous Internet memes in fighting the climate crisis. Climate change has a comparatively low news value overall, outside of concrete crises, and humour has the potential to break through where news reporting itself does not; how are memes deployed in climate discourse, then?

There is no unified definition of Internet memes, but broadly they contain text, image, and/or video content that reproduce pop-cultural references and require contextual knowledge for a full understanding. Humour has always been present …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Serge Banyongen, whose interest is in political communication and agenda-setting on climate change during the recent Canadian election. Climate change has become an increasingly important political topic in Canada, but this is not always reflected in election results; this is in part because ecological discourse is being cannibalised by economic issues.

This study approaches the debate through a production, process, and perception triangulation, analysing political discourse, media content, and voter responses. This builds on framing theory, agenda-setting theory, issue attention theory, and issue voting theory.

Pre-election …

I’m a little late to the post-lunch session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, which has started with Ana Margarida Barreto’s paper on discussions of climate change on eleven Portuguese parties’ Facebook pages. They investigated the presence of various climate change-related topics on those pages.

Two broadly green parties talked about climate change considerably more than any of the others; though during the election all other parties also talk somewhat more about climate change. Most parties share a substantial number of images and videos, though the far-right populist Chega party exclusively shared links and no audiovisual content.

Minor and …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Timothy Koskie, looking for media pluralism in AI-generated local news. But actually, these systems are not necessarily artificial intelligence in the full sense of the term: they are simply content generators. These systems feed on media content, and will make mistakes as they do so; this is not necessarily all that different from human-driven news media, however.

But how do AI content generators fit into the media ecosystem? Can they contribute to media pluralism, and thereby increase the media ecosystem’s health? If so, this could considerably …

And the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Haroon Hakimi, whose focus is on the BBC’s representation of Afghanistan in its news reporting. Internationally, people are often perceived through the popular image of their nation, and this is especially pronounced for countries which many people will have no personal experience of, such as Afghanistan.

More generally, national image can be shaped at the personal level, through friends and contacts; at the organisational level, where PR companies might run image campaigns; and the mass media level, where news reporting strongly affects how audiences perceive …

The next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on news and social media framing, and starts with Xu Pengfei, examining how Chinese and Korean news reported on the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge in 2023. Chinese and Korean news outlets reported intensively on this, given the fears about how the nuclear waste might affect their coastal regions.

Key to this study is news framing theory, which tends to identify a number of key framing approaches; in East Asia, historical frames are especially common in international reporting. How, then, did Chinese and Korean media frame the event, and what …