The current (2024-2027) research program of NODE is titled “Friends and enemies: trust and suspicion in a new media landscape”. The title “Friends and enemies” refers to two related areas. Firstly, the widespread perception that the political public opinion formation is becoming more and more identity-based, i.e. that in various political issues and debates it is becoming increasingly important for people to what extent they can identify with the person or persons who present certain arguments or have certain positions, rather than valuing the issue itself. Secondly, the title also refers more specifically to the role that journalism and journalists have in people’s everyday lives and in their world of political ideas: are journalists seen as “friends” or “enemies”? This increasing view of journalists as either allies or opponents does not emerge in a vacuum: there are political actors who more or less explicitly want to portray journalists as “enemies”. The negative identification seems to be more common than the positive one, i.e. there is no strong movement that wants to portray journalists as “friends”. This way of understanding and describing journalism is in most cases very foreign to journalists themselves, who in their professional role and in their professional ideals and ethical rules rather emphasize that journalists should be neither friends nor enemies, but provide neutral and fair information about society

Within this program, NODE researchers are studying a variety of topics, e.g. threats and harassment of Swedish journalists; the role of AI in providing information on contentious issues; news production and news funding in Brazilian favelas; the strategies of malicious actors who have made spreading disinformation their business model; and so on.