The second day at ICA 2018 starts for me with a panel on the personalisation of search, and the first presenter is Grant Blank. He begins by noting the importance of free-flowing information for society, but of course the media through which such information flows have changed over time, and this has affected media biases. Contemporary media now form a diverse media ecology.

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Nicholas Robinson, who starts by challenging the idea that the relationships between news media and politics operate on a linear basis. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse, and the ‘war on the news media’ now being waged by Donald Trump and other populists, this perception may need to be challenged.

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The next ICA 2018 session is on journalism under attack, and starts with Arjen van Dalen. He notes that journalists and politicians have traditionally been seen as societal actors who are closely interlinked and indeed mutually dependent, but that the emergence of outsider politicians and journalists has disrupted that relationship.

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

The next speaker in this ICA session is Jan Kleinnijenhuis, who asks whether journalists are still necessary in promoting the social media messages of politicians. Current research is unclear on this: there are few time-series studies that would be able to show trends in this field; many studies also remain quantitative and fail to examine the specific content of politicians’ social media posts.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Mark Owen Jones, whose focus is on social media propaganda in Persian Gulf states. Overall, there is still a considerable lack of research into social media propaganda in Arabic; in Gulf states, there is a long history of 'fake news' in social media, and hate speech towards particular groups, ethnicities, and countries is not uncommon. Hate speech may be operationalised by ruling autocrats as a tool to divide and rule the population; different religious groups are allowed to attack each other, to keep them from uniting and toppling the government.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Alex Hogan, whose focus is on the impact of online political communities in politics. There is still considerable debate on whether online action promotes or retards other forms of collective action offline; the recent rise of the 'alt-right' adds another chapter to this discussion.