Twitter

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Alexandra Pavliuc, whose interest is in the impact of gender in diplomatic communications between Ukraine and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While much of the focus has also been on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public persona, women have played a substantially larger part in public diplomacy by Ukraine on social media (and especially Twitter) since the invasion, and their use of such media has been distinctly different.

The keynote speaker on this section day of the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the wonderful Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna, whose focus is on the use of online visual content for connective action and communication, especially also in the context of conflict. How do strategic actors and activists use visual communication, what narratives do they promote, how do audiences engage with this, and how do such narratives spread on social media as a result?

Annie’s work focusses on climate narratives in Austria and Germany, in particular, but the broader team also covers a wider transnational picture in Europe; it examines the production, pictures, publics, and propagation of climate change-related narratives across platforms. Key platforms here include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, and a key interest is in concepts related to interactional, positional, and affective polarisation amongst the users who engage with relevant (visual) content.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose interest is in the shaping of communication flows about Ukraine across English, French, and German communities. Such efforts are part of information warfare, aiming to win the battle for public opinion and perception; Russia, in particular, is employing state media and troll armies to disseminate its propaganda about the causes and progress of its war against Ukraine. More recently, this has also include nuclear threats, rhetoric, and diplomacy.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, whose interest is in visual political communication across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in Brazil in the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Visual affordances are critically important in political campaigning, and such affordances continue to change; this works differently across different platforms, and cross-platform and/or multi-platform studies are therefore also critically important.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Megan Brown, whose focus is on the impact of the closure of the Twitter API on public-interest research. The discontinuation of Twitter’s Academic API was announced in February 2023, and remaining APIs are priced exorbitantly and outside the reach of publicly-funded researchers; this has severely affected any further research on the platform.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ori Tenenboim, whose interest is in why news users limit their public expression online. This might be driven by perceptions of the visibility of their news engagement, and of the consequences that such visibility may have.