1st International Conference on Crisis Media Literacy

Dealing with a Crisis...

Over the past years, we have been experiencing difficult times for information-seeking, searching, consumption, and analysis. Indeed, understanding information behaviors, communication, and often-used manipulation techniques have been essential to prevent and avoid possible scenarios of disinformation, misinformation, or/and mal-information.

In a prosumer culture, in which the practices of making, remixing, and sharing within a multi-platform spectrum frequently leads to an overload and excess of information. In a communication crisis scenario, which demand people to make decisions and act upon an emergence in a short-term period (e.g., war, pandemics, natural disaster), this overload and circulation of erroneous information may cause panics, conspiracy theories, hate speech, and mistrust in the organizations with severe impacts to democracy. This overabundance of information also affects the newsrooms in which the atomization of time, prioritization of ex-post over ex-ante filters, divergences in the messages to be conveyed by different stakeholders in the debates, and difficulties in business models are challenged.

The Code of Practice on Disinformation, the European Digital Media Observatory, and fact-checking initiatives constitute some examples of efforts been made to establish strategies to address these challenges, however, there remains a paucity in the articulation of scientific, community, and legislation knowledge on information seeking and use behavior, media strategies used, hacking, or AI-generated content.

This conference intends to serve as a gathering of researchers of media literacy concerned with the communication processes dealing with crisis situations, like moments of war, plagues, and elections. We’re looking for state-of-art and projects on designing, implementing, or assessing media trust in crisis communication.

All submissions related to this theme are welcome, including

• Research media policy
• Communication rights
• Speech regulation, privacy, platform regulation
• Digitally mediated tools in information literacy
• Education practices in crisis communication
• Journalistic roles
• Practices in times of crisis

Are you a media professional, regulator or journalist? Don’t be overwhelmed by the scientific nature of this conference. There is also space for you. Show us your case.

There are many ways to participate in this conference! Please drop us a line to digimedia-cml2024@ua.pt.