‘Fake News’

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.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Hong Li, whose interest is in ‘grey actors’ in online public opinion. The case study here is the ‘Internet water army’: a group of users who are paid to post online comments on Chinese social media platforms in order to promote vested interests. This is an astroturfing effort for public relations and media manipulation, and has become a major social media industry in China.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Ferruh Yılmaz, whose interest is in far-right strategies for dealing with Critical Race Theory. He begins by noting the differences between culture and policy: people attach themselves to broader political and social identities at least as much as they do to good policies on specific issues.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is the excellent Rita Gsenger, whose focus is on the adaptive conspiracy ideation of online cults like QAnon. QAnon is a conspiratorial movement that combines several elements, centred on the elusive figure of ‘Q’ who posts occasional cryptic information drops on the 4chan message board, claiming US government insider knowledge.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Christian Baden, who begins by noting that propaganda has become a substantially growing concern again in recent years. Propaganda is more than just ‘fake news’, of course: it may provide actual facts, but out of context or with a biased spin, for example, and false information is often only used around the margins to enhance the propagandistic effect and establish epistemic authority.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lin Pan, whose interest is in investigative journalism in the social media age in China. She highlights the issue of mis- and disinformation on social media, which is a problem in China too, but notes that the impact of this problem on investigative reporting has yet to be fully understood.

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

The final presenters at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference this evening are my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Tim Graham, presenting a pilot project leading into a larger research project on ‘dark political communication’: expanding from a narrow focus on disinformation to examine the problematic communication strategies of political elites for political gain. One strategy in such communication is disinformative attacks: here, political actors make specific false claims regarding their political opponents, and manage to get these covered by journalists because journalism has a negativity bias, conflict bias, and/or an immediacy and timeliness bias. Such attacks seem to remain undertheorised in political communication literature.

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Jing Zeng, whose focus is on Trumpism in the online Sinosphere. There was a lot of public animosity between presidents Trump and Xi during Trump’s term in office, but there also appears to be a surprising amount of support for Trump both within China as well as in the Chinese diaspora around the world. Chinese-Americans were one of the groups of Asian-Americans with the greatest amount of support for Trump, in fact.

And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.