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Destructive Polarisation in the Voice to Parliament Referendum: A Preliminary Assessment

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:

Are We Heading for Another Facebook News Ban?

Over the past month, Meta has been in the news again for its troubled relationship with news and news publishers in Australia and elsewhere, and several media outlets have asked me to provide some commentary on recent developments. Two major new announcements from Meta prompted this: first, the news that it would not renew its agreements with some Australian news publishers to voluntarily share a small amount of its advertising revenue with them; and second, the announcement that it would progressively downrank news content on Instagram.

This follows on, of course, from the brief ban of all news content on the Australian Facebook in February 2021, after the federal government introduced a law, the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), intended to compel Meta and other search and social media platforms to share some of their advertising revenue with news publishers; and from a similar, still ongoing news blackout on Facebook that has been in place in Canada since August 2023 after its parliament passed a bill that was strongly influenced by the Australian NMBC.

I had an opportunity to discuss the Australian news ban and its implications in a foreword I contributed to my friend Jonathon Hutchinson’s new book Digital Intermediation: Unseen Infrastructure for Cultural Production, which I’ve now made available separately here as well. Drawing on Jonathon’s terms, the news ban clearly demonstrates Meta’s power, as a key digital intermediary, over the flow of news and information, and its ability to materially affect this flow within hours; however, the News Media Bargaining Code also provides a cautionary example of how not to go about curtailing that power – for various reasons that have much more to do with politics than policy, it is, in the end, a very poorly designed mechanism, as Australia and Canada have by now found out. The foreword article is available here:

Axel Bruns. “Digital Intermediation, for Better or Worse.” Foreword to Digital Intermediation: Unseen Infrastructure for Cultural Production, by Jonathon Hutchinson. London: Routledge. xv-xxiii.

In the following, I’m going to share some responses I’ve provided to one of the journalists who approached me about the ongoing NMBC saga. There was too much here to use in a news article, but the query was useful in prompting me to outline my views on Meta’s actions in response to the NMBC.

What caused the Australian Facebook news ban?

Patterns in Commenting on the YouTube Videos of Alexey Navalny

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule.

Politicians and Media as Influencers of Social Media Polarisation during the Qatargate Scandal

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Rita Marchetti, who shifts our attention to another scandal: the Qatargate case. She notes the limited attention of media scholars to corruption issues, even in spite of growing funding for anticorruption studies of legacy media – the potential role of social media in anticorruption activism has received very limited attention, in particular.

How the Tangentopoli Corruption Scandal Turbocharged Italian Media Populism

The final session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium in Bologna starts with Marco Mazzoni, whose focus is on media populism – and he centres his presentation on the politicisation of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal as a media event in the early 1990s, which became the starting-point of media populism in Italy.

How Media Coverage Might Drive Polarisation (and Depolarisation)

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Sergio Martini, whose interest is in the role of media in perceived polarisation. This might be driven by the conflict focus in media coverage, and its attention especially to extreme positions – but are there ways to counteract this and contribute to depolarisation instead?

Interconnections between Affective Polarisation, Populist Attitudes, and Political Distrust

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Danilo Serani, whose focus is on affective polarisation, political distrust, and populist attitudes in Italy. Affective polarisation seems to be on the rise globally, but how can we explain this development? It may be driven at least in part by what Danilo calls ‘demand-side populism’ (individuals’ pre-existing populist attitudes), as well as by underlying political distrust.

How Trust in Political Institutions Informs Italian Citizens’ Attitudes towards the EU

The next session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium starts with Giuliano Bobba, whose focus is on Italian citizens’s attitudes towards the EU during the COVID-19 crisis. There has been a growing recognition of the importance and roles of European institutions, and their activities are entwined and sometimes conflict with the political agendas of national governments; this produces a dynamic of politicisation.

Reviewing the Performance of Automated Incivility Classifiers

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Patrícia Rossini, who is also focussing on incivility. She begins by noting that this is a feature, and not a bug, of social media, and that conventional empirical research into incivility on social media tends to examine blatant forms (name-calling, profanity) rather than implementing more sophisticated perspectives.

Exploring Citizens’ Understandings of Incivility in Politics

The next speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Rossella Rega, and her interest is in political incivility. Studies on this topic have increased substantially since the 2010s, as a new generation of political actors appeared on the scene. This points to a marked increase in aggression and incivility both in politics itself as well as in (some) media coverage.

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