Polarisation

The next speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Ozgur Can Seckin and Bao Truong, who begin by outlining the issue of political polarisation – especially in the United States. They distinguish between polarisation on specific issues on the one hand, and affective polarisation between the partisans supporting various political groups on the other; this latter form of polarisation is therefore a problem of in-group and out-group exposure and engagement.

Some approaches have sought to address this by increasing exposure to out-group content and perspectives; some have attempted to encourage people to imagine the views of the other …

The final speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project is Holger Heppner, whose focus in on counterspeech to problematic information. Counterspeech techniques include behavioural (referencing social norms and warning of the consequences of breaking them), emotional (empathy, humour, retaliation), and cognitive approaches (debating, and pointing out inconsistencies); in addition, there are also more mechanical approaches like direct regulation and indirect interventions like downvoting or flagging problematic content.

Picking some of these options – highlighting inappropriateness (behavioural), evoking compassion for targets (emotional), and presenting additional facts (cognitive) –, Holger then tested the effectiveness of counterspeech …

The next speaker at the Bots Building Bridges workshop is Mathieu O’Neil; Mathieu begins by highlighting the challenge of information overload and is connection of mis- and disinformation. Media and information literacy are key tools for enabling people to better manage such information overload, and there are number of opportunities here.

These might preemptively build competencies for the longer or shorter term, provide better context for information, or react to the circulation of disinformation through debunking and fact-checking. Key here is also the development of better discernment abilities, enabling people to identify when they need further information; once this need …

The next speaker in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session is Ana Sofia Cardenal, who has recently finished a project on pathways to misinformation that built on Web tracking data. The results of this work also inform a new project which constructs simulated environments for online discussions in order to explore how different discursive settings affect the dynamics of such discussions.

The earlier project addressed the substantial problem of mis- and disinformation, across digital and social media environments and beyond. It showed that visits to fringe and problematic information sources are actually fairly rare, even though many people hold at …

The post-lunch session at the Bots Building Bridges workshop starts with Lars Rinsdorf, whose focus is on regaining the initiative in defending pluralistic society. Pluralistic democracy is built on diversity and inclusion, and seeks to empower all citizens to participate in societal processes and structures; but this also implies an intense debate on the challenges and frictions of diverse society.

Such processes are threatened by societal polarisation and disintegration; these undermine trust in societal institutions, and lead to dysfunctional public debate and the rise of counter-knowledge orders. How can we push back against such disinformation, and enhance the resilience of …

It’s a Wednesday in Germany, and I’m in Bielefeld for a workshop of the Bots Building Bridges (3B) project. We start with an overview of the project’s activities to date, with Florian Muhle, Ole Pütz, Rob Ackland, and Matthias Orlikowski. The project focusses on online political discourse, and the dysfunctions in such discourse that are apparent in social media environments. This also addresses the questions of ‘echo chambers’, of polarisation, and of impacts on democratic discourse. Social media are not solely to blame for this: it may also be possible to support productive political discourse through social media, given the …

I was next at the Weizenbaum Conference, presenting on our efforts to develop a dynamic practice mapping of climate change debates in Australia. Here are the slides, and for more information on the practice mapping approach see my recent post introducing the approach, and our first article in Social Media + Society about it…

The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.

To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …

The second speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Julian Maitra, whose focus is on the German far-right’s plans for ‘remigration’: the forced expulsion of legal migrants from Germany. Notably, that term is now also used by the Trump administration as it plans its own mass deportations of residents from the US.

Ideas surrounding such remigration rhetoric connect affective publics and affective polarisation with cumulative racism, platforms racism, and digital populism. Julian explored these debates by gathering public social media posts from Facebook and Instagram on this concept, and is interested how they evolved over time. There were …

I’m presenting some early results of our large-scale dynamic practice mapping of Australian climate change discussions on Facebook later in this next session at the Weizenbaum Conference, but we begin with a paper by Konstantin Lackner, Markus Uhlmann, and Viktoria Horn. Their focus is on news navigation and recommendation: recommendations enable users to navigate information overload, but also create potential monetary gain for content sources.

Recommendations can be problematic because they optimise for retention and attention, and therefore for profit; this is also increasingly done through AI; and the result of such recommendations may be that users no longer …