Researchers from Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data in the ICA 2025 international conference

Disruption and consolidation in communications research: this is the theme of the 75th annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), held in Denver, United States, with the active participation of academics from the Faculty of Communications at the Catholic University and IMFD researchers Magdalena Saldaña and Sebastián Valenzuela.

Researchers will present their work on the critical analysis of the media ecosystem, focusing on the search for solutions to strengthen reliable information in contexts of high social and technological uncertainty faced internationally, and especially in Latin America and Chile.

Magdalena Saldaña is participating as co-organizer of the ICA Media and Communication in Global Latinidades pre-conference, and will also present her research "Trust in News and Journalism: How Misinformation Might Erode News Media Legitimacy in Latin American Countries" and "Efforts to Counteract Misinformation and Empower Citizens: The Case of Chile" in two ICA panels, respectively: Between War Crimes, Political Pressures, and Fake News: A Global Perspective on the Difficulties of Being a Journalist; and Intercultural Communication in the Age of Mis/Disinformation: Impacts and Strategies for Disruption Locally and Globally.

Meanwhile, Sebastián Valenzuela will participate in four sessions with presentations that explore the effects of artificial intelligence on journalism and users' reactions to misinformation: In the panel Audience Perceptions of News Authored by Artificial Intelligence, he will present "Effects of Generative AI for News on Media Credibility and Selectivity: A Conjoint Experiment in Chile." In Public Responses to Misinformation, he will participate with "Online Civic Interventions: Exploring Users' Reactions to Misinformation in Chile"; and finally, in the segment entitled Shaping Public Perception: Media and Its Impact on Societal Concerns, he will present "Expanding the Scope of Network Agenda Setting: The Rubik's Cube Problem." In addition, the NUDOS researcher will also be a panelist in the special session "A Half Century of Agenda-Setting Research: Honoring the Lives and Contributions of Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw," in tribute to the founders of this influential theory in communication studies.

ICA is an international association with more than 5,000 members in over 80 countries, and since 2003, ICA has been officially associated with the United Nations as a non-governmental organization (NGO). On the occasion of the ICA's 75th anniversary, the theme of the 2025 conference is an invitation to critically reflect on communication studies as a discipline and on the ICA as an agent and locus of disciplinary development.