Government

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 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 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.

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 …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yuan Zeng, whose interest is in the tactical uses of social media and their platform affordances by young people in China. This is especially against the backdrop of the ‘zero-COVID’ lockdown in China in 2022.

Young people use digital media on a daily basis to make sense of public issues; especially so during the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, this takes place within a digital authoritarian context that places individual user agency in relation to platform providers and the authoritarian state; this affects their digital media repertoire, their engagement with platform affordances …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nazira Bairbek, whose focus is on the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Kazakhstan; some Russian users in Kazakhstan responded to the invasion by asking Putin to annex Kazakhstan as well, for instance, while many Kazakh people took the side of Ukraine and feared Russian aggression against their own country.

This reflects the complicated post-colonial nature of many post-Soviet nations; they have fought for their independence from Russian influence since 1991, but maintain close relationships with Russia, and some people in these countries believe that they cannot survive without …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Caixie Tu, whose interest is in Hong Kong residents’ discussions about government ordinances on social media. The key question here is who speaks out on social media, and for what reasons.

Users’ cognitive responses can mediate such processes; this may include news attention, news knowledge, information elaboration, and other aspects, and engagement with heterogeneous information sources may be especially important. Individuals’ issue involvement, which may be value-relevant or outcome-relevant, may also affect their level of engagement in such debates.

How do the two types of issue involvement mediate the influence of …

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 …