Social Media

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 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 …

The next paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is presented by Yeran Kim, Miran Pyun, and Danbi Kim, who begin by introducing the idea of the platform paradox: digital platforms are configured by contradictory logics of freedom versus control, transparency versus surveillance, and efficiency versus fatigue; these are integrated and entangled in user experience, and mean that platforms are experiences as complex, dynamic assemblages.

This demonstrates how technology and society are always intertwined, and digital society especially is a control society where power is open, mobile, and seductive, and not just repressive; user agency here …

The next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts with Du Hengyu, whose focus is on the relationships between social media users and platform algorithms. Such algorithms are central to platforms; they influence what content we encounter, and how we can engage with others on these platforms. This has been studied from a user experience perspective, and over the shorter and longer term, but there remains a lack of relationship cycle models.

This study connected some 46 interviews with Chinese users of Weibo, TikTok, Bed Booklet, Bilibili, and Instagram, exploring their perceptions of platform algorithms. It examines their …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Melanie Radue, whose interest is in moral panics and polarised discourses in Malaysia and Germany. This is in the context of a turn towards the conservative right in countries around the world, which often uses and fuels polarising discourses through moral panics, leading to democratic backsliding. What is the role of traditional media in such processes?

The concept of moral panics helps us to understand how certain issues become identified and intensified in media discourse: moralised discourses have long been understood as intensifying polarised narratives; they …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Zeyu Zhu, whose interest is in global communication on Twitter between 2012 and 2022. We lack a systematic empirical description of global communication over this decade, which saw a rise of the Global South as documented in politics and economics, but is less well documented communication research.

This project works with a dataset drawn from the 1% real-time Twitter sample as available from the Internet archive; accounts captured in this dataset were geolocated based on their profiles using the Nominatim software; and retweet actions were then …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Dorothy Njoroge, whose focus is on youth protests in Africa – these have been occurring around the world over the past decades, although African protests have been less visible in global media coverage than similar events in America, Asia, or Europe.

Africa has a very substantial youth population, but very limited socio-economic perspectives for its youth; they are politically marginalised, in a stage of ‘waithood’ where adulthood is suspended due to a lack of economic opportunities, but also better-educated and more technologically literate than earlier generations …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Kata Horváth, whose focus is on political influencer videos in the 2024 Hungarian elections. Hungary has now backslid into authoritarianism, and its mainstream media system have been captured by political interests aligned with the Fidesz party; the social media environment is also severely affected by hostile narratives from disinformation influencers, however.

Hostile narratives are designed to create an enemy figure that provides a target for social frustrations, reinforce polarisation, and distract from real issues. Social media advertising is also dominated by the Fidesz party, in part …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Ivan Paganotti, whose interest is in Brazil’s suspension of Xitter in August to October 2024 as a result of its non-compliance with Brazilian court rulings on media regulation. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court has been quite active in the field of media regulation, and its suspension of Xitter has set a precedent that may also be of relevance to other jurisdictions.

Xitter had been found to be non-compliant with Brazilian court rulings on blocking and removing the profiles of far-right influencers who were undermining its democratic …