Social Media's Role for Media Accountability - Presentation at the ICA

Last week, MKI co-presented research results from the international and interdisciplinary GLOHOMA project on media accountability at the ICA conference in Paris.

In many of the countries, which the authors from the MENA region and Asia researched for the international and interdisciplinary GLOHOMA-project, the media system is under pressure of authoritarian governments, clientelistic ownership, or social (violent) conflicts. Thus, traditional instruments of media self-regulation are vulnerable to many external pressures. This might be one reason why press councils are not the most prominent media accountability instrument in most countries under study.

Instead, Social Media play a crucial role for citizens as well as professionals to hold the media to account. In their presentation at the International Communication Association's (ICA) annual conference in Paris, Dr. Judith Pies and Dr. Hanan Badr highlighted this on multiple cases from the GLOHOMA-project. The two communication researches concluded their presentation with a conceptual framework for researching media accountability practices in non-democratic countries in the future.