Elections

And the final speaker at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is Nisha Singh, whose focus is on negative online political advertisements in India, especially in the context of elections. Elections are critical to democratic processes, and enable the people to voice their concerns to politicians; they also educate the public about democratic and political processes and stimulate political discourse.

Advertising has long been central to election processes, but the rise of digital advertising has transformed this, and enabled new campaigning approaches; this is no different in India. The rapid uptake of social media in India has further …

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 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 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 final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Amrat Haq, whose focus is on polarisation amongst young people in Pakistan. Pakistani politics has long been populist in nature, and dominated by two broad political groups; however, a third party emerged in the 2010s in the form of Imran Khan’s highly personality-base party, and particularly courted younger voter groups – not least also through its use of social media.

This use of social media by Khan’s party was notable especially in the 2018 election; by the 2024 election the other parties had also caught up …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …