Polarisation

The post-lunch session on this first day of ECREA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in the case of disruptive climate protests. Such protests, in Germany for instance by the Letzte Generation protest group, tend to attract controversial media coverage, and it may be such coverage rather than the protests themselves that drive polarisation dynamics.

Untangling the various factors influencing such dynamics is difficult, and this project examined both news media coverage and social media debates to determine patterns of both issue and group polarisation, in both the content of communication and the …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 is Agnieszka Stępińska, whose focus is on understanding from current researchers how they approach the study of public opinion formation. This includes academic scholars, experts working for think tanks, and professional public opinion pollsters, and a short questionnaire will be distributed to these groups within the coming weeks, with a focus on central and eastern European and Balkans countries.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Christian Baden, whose emphasis is on the theoretical challenges in studying public opinion dynamics in digital spaces. One such challenge is that what people say (loudly and publicly) on the Internet is not inherently representative for overall public opinion; and that public opinion expression on social media also intersects with and is being negotiated through mainstream and alternative media coverage.

Public opinion expression on social media is therefore participatory and subject to an interactive negotiation; the focus here is not on what is being said, but what remains standing after this …

The next session at ECREA 2024 is a panel on the study of public opinion expressions, organised by the Opinion Network initiative. We start with Dimitra Milioni, discussing the study of opinion expression in a comparative cross-platform perspective across social media platforms. This focusses on the interplay between user practices and digital architectures, as viewed from a sociotechnical perspective.

Elements of this might include the way that pseudonymity or anonymity settings influence politeness and civility in commenting; the way that similarities between commenter identities on social media as compared to mainstream media discussion fora affect discussion processes; or the way …

Finally, we end this ECREA 2024 session with a video presentation by Kilian Bühling, whose focus is on the use of Telegram for German-language COVID-19 protest mobilisation. This covers some 715 broadcast channels and 229 public group chats. Telegram has a 10% audience reach in Germany, and is used especially by contentious social movements for both public and private communication. The perceived anonymity and lack of content moderation here are especially attractive to such groups – including the Querdenker movement which opposed public health measures to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.

This movement was established in spring 2020, and engaged in …

The final speaker in this final Social Media & Society 2024 session is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor Farfan, whose interest is in the use of semiotics in combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the study of polarisation. NLP comes with a very diverse range of applications, variously examining superficial and structural aspects at differing levels of complexity.

Kate’s work is interested centrally in the structure of texts, and dependency parsing is a useful tool for this – but such analytical frameworks also substantially complicate the analysis: dependency parsing can show up some 40 or more relationships between words …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.

Similarly, there is plenty of evidence of spatial polarisation in the United States, where certain states and counties are regarded as dominated by Republicans or Democrats; this points to a spatial sorting and geographic clustering of political partisans. How might we connect such individual-level homophily and place-level …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

Elite and mass polarisation have similar dynamics, and may be related to each other; mass polarisation is often measured on a simple left-right political scale, but in multiparty systems can be better assessed within a cognitive political network framework, where respondents assess the interrelationships between the various parties and thereby produce …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …