Polarisation

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Julie Browning, whose focus is on the role of campaigning media during the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A referendum represents an unusual campaign in that it is polarised by design (the choice is a simple Yes or No), and can cut across party lines (as it did in this case, at least to some extent).

This can be both an advantage and disadvantage, as it can also lead to disorganised campaigning by multiple groups that otherwise have little in common with each other and do not …

And the next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is my colleague Samantha Vilkins, who continues our focus on the Voice to Parliament referendum by addressing especially the role of opinion polling and poll reporting in the context of the Voice referendum campaign. She begins by noting the long period of public debate about the Voice, going back at least to the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, with a much shorter formal campaign period before the referendum date of 14 October 2023.

Opinion polls provided a kind of spine for the coverage of the Voice debate throughout …

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.

Online CT and CVE approaches were shaped especially in a post-9/11 world and represent the power dynamics of their industry; platform moderation that addresses such phenomena is informed by a larger ecosystem of governance that occupies a disproportionate area …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Jessie Daniels, who begins by suggestion that we are in a genocidal moment in the United States and around the world. There is a need to combat the rise of the far right – yet much of the research that engages with the far right still merely studies it, rather than developing approaches to fighting it.

One of the transitions that need to happen here is to develop a greater focus on far-right governments: the far-right is no longer simply opposed to the state, but in a number of cases – …

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2023 is Bharath Ganesh, whose particular focus is on the long-standing white nationalist site Stormfront. How does community work here – indeed, can it be understood as an online community or might it be better understood as a networked public?

What is important about online communities is that over time they develop, create, and codify group-specific meanings and norms; much of this is also about the constriction and maintenance of symbolic boundaries between the in- and out-groups. This may involve a diacritical (us vs. them) axis and a moral (good vs …

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2023 starts with a panel on the far right, and I’ll be slightly distracted as I’m also keeping an eye on the second half of the Hannover 96 – FC Magdeburg match, but let’s see how we go. We’re starting with Mathilda Åkerlund, whose interest is in the racialisation of sexual assault reports from Sweden by the US far-right.

Sweden has losing had a very positive international image, and ranks highly globally in quality of life, social welfare, and other indices – yet the international far right has attempted to reconfigure this image to claim …

The final speaker at this AoIR 2023 session is Zelly Martin, whose focus is on the female spreaders of health disinformation. This is also in the context of the US Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the right to abortion in the United States, which is part of a long history of activism against abortion, birth control, and female reproductive rights. These in turn are motivated in part by the racist fear that white people in the US are going to be replaced by people of colour, which sees reproductive rights as a vehicle for this so-called ‘Great Replacement’.

Such conspiracy …