‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Nicoleta Corbu, who explores the same dataset as the previous two speakers by examining third-person perceptions about misinformation detection. People generally tend to perceive greater media effects on third persons than on themselves; this might also have consequences for their own behaviours, such as less active fact-checking practices – but to date, there is no empirical data to prove this assumption.

The second speaker in this panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Christine Meltzer, whose focus is on the perception of social cohesion in society, and its relationship with media use. Such cohesion is critical as it plays a crucial role in societies’ responses to crises.

The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session on alternative media is Pablo Porten-Cheé, whose focus is on countering misinformation with narratives. He begins with an example of the public discourse in Slovakia about the Roma community.

The third speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Miriam Milzner and Vivien Benert, presenting a content-based classification of German alternative news media. Recent definitions of such alternative media have moved away from a focus on these media as supporting subaltern counterpublics, and towards a focus on the emergence of right-wing online media as self-proclaimed alternatives to the mainstream.

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information.

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by Mike Schäfer and Mark Eisenegger. Here, I’m returning to my long-standing interest in dragging public sphere theory kicking and screaming into the digital age, by outlining a number of the fundamental building blocks of the network of publics that has become our everyday reality, and identifying some of the empirical approaches we may use to study those building blocks and their interrelationships in situ. Written in late 2022, many of the examples I use to illustrate these approaches are still drawn from waning social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, so one of the next challenges for our field will need to be to translate these approaches to new and emerging online platforms – and that will certainly also be an important aspect of my work over the coming years.

Axel Bruns. “From ‘the’ Public Sphere to a Network of Publics: Towards an Empirically Founded Model of Contemporary Public Communication Spaces.” Communication Theory, June 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ct/qtad007.

And the final speaker for this session and this day at IAMCR 2023 is Aline Duelen, whose focus is on the use of AI in combatting disinformation. Disinformation is a major problem in online communication spaces today, of course, and there is some existing research that identifies factors that play a role in detecting disinformation – but these cannot easily be automated, as their application usually requires the application of critical thinking skills. The development of more automated systems therefore requires citizen co-creation approaches.

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is by Livia Gardía-Faroldi, who presents a comparative analysis of disinformation on social media across the UK, France, and Spain. Such a comparative study is necessary given the very different political and media environments across these countries. Do the audiences in these countries differ in their interest and trust in the news; their concern about fake news; and their use of social media for informational purposes?

The final speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Beate Josephi, whose focus is on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Her interest is in the initial annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and the focus here is on how Russia argued its case at that point – in this case, through the coverage in the Russian weekly newspaper Argumenti i Fakti.