Polarisation

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.

I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.

Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in …

And the final speakers at the Bots Building Bridges workshop project are Mathias Orlikowski and Tony Veale, who begin by noting that bots can have a positive impact on online discussion by facilitating an increase in viewpoint diversity. Such bots might emphasise rational debate, but could also introduce more humorous perspectives.

One example of a polarised debate in Germany is the ongoing discussion about the introduction of a stricter speed limit on German freeways; in online discussions about this, a discussion bot could intervene by presenting an opposite point of view. Some such arguments could be pre-written responses to well-known …

The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.

Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

The second day at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld starts with Dennis Frieß, whose interest is in AI and deliberation. He notes the importance of online publics for deliberation; however, they often do not live up to the ideal norms of deliberation, due to a lack of equality, rationality, and reciprocity as well as problems with incivility.

There have been various attempts to counter this, through law enforcement, moderation, civil society initiatives, and other means; most recently, there is considerable interest in using artificial intelligence to support high-quality, deliberative online discussions.

What problems are there …

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …