Polarisation

Up next in this final ICA 2024 conference session is Niklas Venema, whose focus is also on counterpublics. These have become a key concept for analysing polarised and fragmented communication environments in hybrid media systems, with the focus initially mainly on empowering counterpublics that support marginalised communities, while more recently we have also needed to theorise far-right counterpublics that require a further adaptation of this concept.

What is being studied under this term, then, and how it is conceptualised? The present study conducted a literature search of English and German articles between 2000 and 2023, identifying some 139 relevant articles …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The focus here is on Twitter and YouTube, working with some 18 million tweets and 59,000 YouTube videos between 2012 and 2022 that contain the term ‘woke’ and its derivations. These were addressed through …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

, and starts with Ryan Moore. Past research has explored the impact of social media on access to mis- and disinformation sources, but remains somewhat inconclusive or very context- and platform-specific. Some of this is drawing on self-reporting; some on browsing data (where it usually focusses on direct referrals from social media platforms); a more indirect link has yet to be explored in full.

Here, social media posts may lead people to other places online that then lead …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Helena Rauxloh, exploring how conspiracy ideation explains general news consumption. This is part of the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten.

Engagement with news and current affairs has a very important democratic function, but engagement with niche and alternative media especially on the far right also exposes users to content that differs markedly from mainstream news content in style, editorial practices, business models, and strategic aims, while there are also considerable differences in approaches within such right-wing alternative media. Engagement with such media might especially also relate …

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Claire Wonjeong Jo, whose focus is on the effects of cross-cutting exposure – these are seen as including both a better-informed citizenry and greater attitude and affective polarisation, and/or no effects at all. Past research draws largely on survey data, and measure a range of attributes; but perhaps there is a way to observe the actual news use behaviours of participants that provides more direct empirical data.

This study compares such data for South Korea and the United States; it applies social judgment theory, expectation violation theory (which suggests that …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

How different are these conceptualisation? What are their possible implications for democratic outcomes? In spite of the considerable differences between their political systems, both Greece and Brazil had two …

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

This may involve selective exposure (choosing attitude-consonant media content) as well as defensive avoidance (selectively filtering out attitude-challenging sources and information) – and these are not necessarily inherently connected as a zero-sum game. The present study applies this to the coverage of climate change, where conservative media that challenge the accepted science on climate …

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory. This theory introduces five dimensions: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. For environmental issues, these might be integrated into three broader categories: pragmatism/idealism, responsibility/profit, innovation/conservation.

These might be analysed especially in constructive journalism content that …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sujin Choi, presenting a stochastic actor-oriented modelling of shared-issue networks and personal news curation behaviours. The focus here is especially on issue publics, which pay particular attention to specific issues; this reflects the attention economy. But how do such issue publics come to be?

Issue publics might come to be because individuals have similar underlying interests; because they are unaware of other issues; or because of a manual filtering process. Such processes will be affected by their attention to issues (the monadic level); their awareness of other issues (the dyadic …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Harry Yan, whose begins by noting the increase of animosity and affective polarisation against opposing parties in the United States. What role do mass media play in this context? We already know that greater Internet use in itself is not to blame here: this has been shown by a range of studies already. More complex explanations need to be found.

The present study is interested in understanding active and interactive audiences through agent-based modelling – in doing so, this also moves beyond assumptions of passive mass media audiences in past …