Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists interpret supposedly ‘hidden knowledge’ and connect it across domains in order to support their worldviews; this develops …

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities. So, this research is interested in the categorical markers for information deemed to be (un)trustworthy in local contexts, the reflection of local milieux by global conspiracy theories, and the localised analysis of this research.

The project gathered data from Twitter in …

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Debbie Ging, whose focus is on Incel ideology online. Incels are men who believe themselves to be unfairly disadvantaged in then sexual marketplace, leading them to extremely misogynist ideation and sometimes action, with links to broader alt-right and far-right ideologies. But they have often been studied through temporary snapshots, rather than focussing on the dynamics in such communities, and the ConCel project that produced this paper is an attempt to address this limitation in the existing research. It takes a more diachronic, ecological, and ecosystem approach to the Incelsphere.

The project …

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

Alternative news environments, then, are constituted by those actors who have shared the same alternative URLs either directly or by on-sharing other actors’ shares. The project worked with a sample of some 160 left-wing, right-wing, and ideologically different alternative news media across Germany, Austria, Sweden, and …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.

The literature so far tells us that Facebook appears to be used especially for international connections between different political actors, and for sharing mainstream and alternative news; on Twitter there are denser networks within countries or language spaces, which are …