Polarisation

And the final presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Gabrielle Princessa Wulaningatri, who returns us to the analysis of polarisation in Australian news media coverage. Ideological polarisation in the general population tends to correlate with attitudes towards climate action; such public polarisation is likely to also be reflected at least to some extent in news coverage of this topic.

The key focus here is on value framing in news media coverage; different values (from self-determination to traditionalism) also tend to be aligned with different ideological positionings. The study examined the presence of such values in the …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague (and freshly minted DECRA Fellow) Katharina Esau, whose interest is especially in patterns of polarisation within the media coverage of climate change. She begins by noting that polarisation remains a poorly defined concept, which includes notions of issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, value-based, and other forms of polarisation.

News media are usually perceived as polarised, too, but there is no robust way of assessing biases in and polarisation between different media outlets. This project, therefore, gathered data from some 26 Australian mainstream and fringe media outlets …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.

Our slides are below:

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’m attending is on digital publics, and starts with Maria Grub and Antonia Wurm, focussing on Twitch as a platform for political discussion in Germany. Twitch, of course, is usually known as a gaming platform which enables people to livestream their gaming sessions while viewers communicate in real-time through a live chat. This can also be monetised, with streamers making money and gaining access to early game releases.

However, users also encounter political content on the platform, at least incidentally; this seems to especially favour right-wing content, and …

And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.

In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Giovanna Mascheroni, whose focus is on discussions with communicative AI systems about controversial and polarising political issues. This was explored by the use of serious games, with ChatGPT performing the role of a political journalist arguing first against and then for the radical Last Generation climate protest group. The switch from one position to the other was made once ChatGPT’s arguments for started to repeat themselves. Students then did the same, and also interacted with ChatGPT as they did so, and a jury judged who …

The third speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on the role of journalism in fuelling discursive polarisation. He begins by referencing controversial public debates about radical climate protests, which usually evidence some level of discursive polarisation. Such polarisation may be ideological and/or affective, and and become destructive for public debate.

This contrasts with democratic transformative communication, which enables societies to address such conflicts productively. Literature has identified a number of factors that may polarise or depolarise; interestingly, exposure to dissonant views is often seen as polarising, but this …

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.

The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …