Polarisation

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

This may be aided by the anonymity and algorithmic shaping of social media feeds. To examine this, this study gathered some 5,000 posts and 67,000 reposts from Weibo about this incident, and found strong engagement in the early days after the event, with decline in activity after a few days …

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system …

The next speaker at the final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is the excellent Helena Rauxloh, with a paper on radical climate protests. Just recently, for example, the Just Stop Oil protest group recently defaced the Stonehenge standing stones, and received some very negative news headlines for this action – yet many of the headlines covering these protests did not even identify what these protests were about. Such radical protests can be compared against more conventional and largely non-disruptive protests like Fridays for Future.

These protests engage with journalism as an arena for and driver of polarisation …

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.

Italy has a multi-party political system with a variety of parties. The 2018 election was won by the populist Five Star Movement, governing together with the far-right Lega. In 2022, a coalition of right-wing and far-right parties …

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Heesoo Jang, whose interest is in the potential biases in Large Language Models. In the United States, a majority of Republican nominees for office in the last mid-term elections denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and in Brazil similar election denialist groups have emerged. This is worsened by political attacks on press freedoms in these and other countries; globally, the challenges to democracies by the rise of far-right authoritarianism are growing. But most existing theories and concepts still focus on ‘stable’ democracies, wherever we might …

The post-lunch session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose interest is in measuring polarising discourses during election campaigns. Tariq and the team have developed a method to measure polarisation at the level of specific discourses: it is rooted in core principles and operationalised approaches that are adaptable to other contexts. Measuring polarisation at the discourse level is important; so far, so much of the work on polarisation has been done using surveys on self-reported political positioning or feelings towards leaders or parties, or has drawn on voting patterns …

The keynote speaker on this section day of the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the wonderful Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna, whose focus is on the use of online visual content for connective action and communication, especially also in the context of conflict. How do strategic actors and activists use visual communication, what narratives do they promote, how do audiences engage with this, and how do such narratives spread on social media as a result?

Annie’s work focusses on climate narratives in Austria and Germany, in particular, but the broader team also covers a wider …

The next speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Andrew Fitzgerald, whose interest is in the use of longitudinal mobile screenshot data in research. This is another response to the emerging challenges in doing research on the power of platforms – platform infrastructures continue to change in their interface design and affordances, algorithmic curation affects what actual content users encounter, access approaches to platform data keep evolving, and new platforms emerge all the time. This means that we need independent data collection methods, beyond what the platforms themselves do or do not provide …