The third presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ciaran Ryan, whose focus is on the populist 2022 Convoy to Canberra, which promoted anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its themes included moralised delegitimisation and affective responses.
This can be described as promoting destructive polarisation on COVID-19 themes: it dehumanised, demeaned, and insulted its opponents. Opponents were seen as existential threats, using hypermoralised language that positioned the contest as a battle between good and evil. This also means that legitimate concerns are ignored, and even in-group members who seek some degree of engagement and consensus with opponents are attacked as traitors to the cause.
This also included threats of violence, linked in rhetoric perhaps somewhat to the Sovereign Citizen movement. It reflects a strong sense of institutional discontent especially towards government, political, and media institutions, and links to an overall decline of trust in institutions in many liberal democracies around the world.
Such views often germinate and connect with other narratives, providing a vacuum that can be filled with mis- and disinformation both by professional hyperpartisan news outlets and by individual news influencers – including the constitutional obscurantism and conspiratorial ideation of Sovereign Citizens.
Platform architectures and affordances can reflect and amplify this polarisation; they reward content that generates engagement, conflict, and ‘us vs. them’ dynamics, and make the most active and noisy users most visible, creating false perceptions of popular support for such loud voices. This amplifies existing polarisation rather than enabling reciprocal deliberation, and the institutional discontent unifies affective publics whose group identity is defined by opposition to ‘the establishment’.
The interplay between affect, platform dynamics, and institutional legitimacy need to be further examined; this is further evolving with changes to platforms and their governments, and the growing influx of generative AI tools and content into these spaces. This has the potential to further deepen institutional discontent and threaten societal cohesion. The main question then becomes how we can engage meaningfully with legitimate grievances about public policies without enabling such extremist views.
