As I wrap up my Mercator Fellowship at ZeMKI in Bremen, I’ve made a side trip to the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which starts for me with a session on the application of network analysis to polarised contexts. We start with Shengyi Gao, whose interest is in group polarisation. She notes the growing fragmentation of social media environments, which creates structural holes in such networks; some users are ‘structural hole spanners’, however, who bridge such gaps by their activities.
The focus here is on Weibo, and the network is constructed from post forwarding activities; the posts are then analysed based on speech behaviours and emotion categories. The impact of structural hole spanners is then modelled through an LLM-driven multi-agent simulation.
This identified two major types of structural hole spanners: rational information-oriented (steering discussion towards rational exchange), and attitude-expressive (steering discussion towards emotional debate). Over time, both can depolarise debate, but in different ways. Emotional polarisation precedes opinion polarisation.
