Snurb's blog

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alma Kalisky, whose focus is on ‘flat earther’ conspiracist communities. Overall, conspiracist beliefs can have significant negative consequences at the personal, social, and societal level, but also provide a ground for community formation and social connection; at the individual and communal level, we must better understand what attracts people to these conspiracy communities.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Rob Topinka, whose focus is on conspiracy theories that are promoted by reactionary ideological entrepreneurs like Russell Brand. Their rhetoric doesn’t need to make any positive propositions: all they need to do is point out things that (in their view) have ‘gone too far’, in in doing so position themselves as bold new heroes who speak for ‘the people’; this can be understood as a new and reactionary form of counter-culture.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the conversation between then-Dutch PM Mark Rutte and historian Yuval Harari at the 2020 World Economic Forum, comparing their utopian and dystopian viscous about AI – and this kicked off a new round of conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum as well as the future uses of AI to subjugate global populations.

Day two at the AoIR 2024 conference starts for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, which is opened by Daniël de Zeeuw. His focus is on the growth of the use of the term PsyOp, or psychological operation – these are usually military or government operations to change public opinion through unconventional means. Conspiracy theories about PsyOps have been pushed increasingly especially by far-right actors in the U.S., including Fox News, and often originate from 4chan; there is a substantial increase especially from 2016 onwards.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the brilliant Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the fundamental changes to the abortion debate in the United States since the current Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling. Abortion has been a highly polarising issue in the US ever since women’s reproductive rights fell under legal jurisdiction in the 1800s, of course, and is tangled up with American nation-building mythologies.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Alia Azmi, whose focus is on the campaign to address sexual violence in Indonesia. For various sociocultural reasons, Indonesia did not engage much with the global #metoo movement; the defamation laws and victim blaming practices have generally deterred victim-survivors to speak out against sexual violence. Indonesia also did not have any strong laws against sexual violence.

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference panel is my QUT colleague Daniel Whelan-Shamy, with whom I’ll present our paper on polarisation on Indigenous debates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In both countries there is a long and complex history of colonial oppression towards their respective Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum sought to remedy this through the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, while in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed as early as 1840 and gradually led to greater recognition and rights for Māori groups. Our work examines the patterns of potentially destructive polarisation in these debates, and our presentation slides are below:

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Laura Iannelli, whose focus is on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Italy was amongst the first countries in the world to implement a mass lockdown, and this became an arena for polarised conflict amongst political elites. The question here is whether this also fostered societal and individual polarisation, and what role mis- and disinformation played in this process.

The next session at the AoIR 2024 conference conference is a session that I co-organised which focusses on controversies, and starts with a presentation by Felipe Soares. His focus is on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, which finally brought the reign of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to an end.

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Gregory Asmolov, who begins by discussing the strange experience of reconnecting with old school friends on social media: do we really want to find out about their political, ideological, societal views? Would we rather disconnect from them again? And if we do so, do we publicly announce that disconnection?