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I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.

Richard illustrates this through an analysis (using Fabio Giglietto’s CooRNet tool) of coordinated activity on Facebook, and asks how Facebook’s redefinition of CIB might …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation. Such breakdown might manifest as an absence of communication between opposing sides, and this is difficult to identify empirically if all we have is trace data about active communication processes.

This project focusses on comments, ‘love’ and ‘angry’ reactions, and shares on Facebook as indicators of affective polarisation on …

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.

Conspiracy believers often come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, have low interpersonal and political trust, and are often perceived as paranoid and dangerous; the emotional belonging that they experience is much less understood: conspiracy groups are communities for …

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.

Ever since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, there has been a consistent effort to push back against its consequences, especially from the conservative right; this is …

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 …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Luigi Arminio, whose interest is in the sociolinguistic patterns of polarisation on climate change on Facebook (this approach carries on from the previous presentation). Such patterns may also represent socioeconomic differences: people with lower socioeconomic status tend to be more open to climate change-denialist rhetoric, and such groups also differ from others in their overall communication styles. Can such differences be identified in climate discourse, marking the proponents and opponents of climate activism? Do they influence audience responses?

The project compiled some 10,000 posts from 250 public pro- and anti-climate …

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Luca Rossi, whose interest is in visual communication strategies in climate change debates. Online debate on these topics tends to be highly polarised between those who do and do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change; it is also difficult to discuss in the abstract, so that visual representations become especially important in these debates.

How do specific images feed into the political narrative on climate change, then: are they used to debate objective facts (e.g. through data visualisations), or in a more polarising way to represent group …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Mette Bengtsson, whose focus is on the relationship between Meta and its network of approved third-party fact-checking organisations. Fact-checking has developed considerably around the world in recent years, and there are several global organisations connecting this network – including the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Meta currently partners with some 90 fact-checking organisations around the world, covering some 60 languages. These can use Meta’s data tools to identify currently circulating claims and select them for assessment; once such assessments have been made, Meta can use them in adjusting its algorithmic ranking of …