Polarisation

The next speakers in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference are the great Marie Santini and Debora Gomes Saloes, whose focus is on anti-sustainability narratives in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The environmental agenda in Brazil is highly polarised especially also because of the power of the agribusiness sector; this sector has an interest in environmental deregulation because of its impacts on the environment. How do these actors support discussions in WhatsApp and Telegram groups in Brazil to spread anti-sustainability discourses, and what problematic content is spread in such platforms?

Marie’s Netlab has monitored such public groups on …

The third speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the dynamics of division and delay in Australian climate and energy discussions. Australia has had a long history of ‘climate wars’ over the appropriate climate policy; during the last election, the conservative opposition pushed for a nuclear energy initiative in part as a means to delay the transition towards renewable energies, for example.

Australians’ understanding of climate change and of the current energy mix is generally limited, and there is considerable opposition especially on the conservative side to net …

My own presentation on behalf of the Laureate team was next in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference, exploring a similar dataset on climate discussions on Facebook between 2018 and 2024 in Australia. Here are the slides:

The last day of the excellent AoIR 2025 conference in Rio de Janeiro starts with our panel on climate change communication in Australia and Brazil – two countries which have quite a few similarities in this context: they’re both highly exposed to extreme weather events, have stressed environments in the Amazon and Great Barrier Reef, and and are major fossil fuel exporters. We start with my excellent colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on the discussion of extreme climate events in social media environments.

Extreme weather experiences affect and are affected by individual perceptions and attitudes towards climate change. Individuals …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on visual political communication on Instagram during Brazil’s 2024 local elections. These took place two years after the deeply polarising presidential elections, and the subsequent Bolsonarist coup attempt; the focus of the present study is especially on how these elections unfolded in São Paulo with its population of nine million registered voters.

In preparation, the Brazilian Electoral Court had made arrangements with several major platform providers to safeguard the elections, and indeed this led one mayoral candidate to be suspended several …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Camilla Tavares, whose focus is on the posts of Brazilian congresswomen who spoke out on Instagram about a proposed constitutional amendment that sought to prohibit legal abortion. Brazil has historically had a high level of gender inequality in parliamentary representation; even though it elected a record number of female representatives in the past election, still only 91 of 513 representatives in the federal parliament are female, and a substantial number of them hold highly conservative positions.

A proposed constitutional amendment in 2024 sought to establish a right to …

The second presenter in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on the Bolsonarist coup attempt in Brazil on 8 January 2022. This occurred after Bolsonaro’s close election loss in November 2022, which Bolsonaro disputed and which led his supporters to call for military intervention. By now, Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for this coup attempt.

These events can be seen as a clear sign of deep-set destructive polarisation in Brazil: there is a breakdown of communication between the sides, an emotional exclusion of others, and a dismissal of information …

The final session today at the AoIR 2025 conference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, who begins by introducing the challenge of assessing polarisation: there are many different definitions of polarisation, which require different measures of assessment. Most current methods fail to sufficiently distinguish between these types of polarisation.

Tariq is therefore proposing a new approach to assessing polarisation, which he has applied to the study of national electoral contests in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Peru. The focus here is to identify polarising rhetoric, including campaign attacks, and polarisation in broader public debates.

The method focusses especially on …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, whose focus is on the manosphere on Reddit, with a particular focus on the gamergate controversy. This phenomenon has in part been studied from the perspective of radicalisation, but this is problematic: the focus of radicalisation studies is often driven by an anti-terrorism law enforcement agenda and centres the state and its institutions while othering religious and ethnic groups, rather than emphasising human experience.

A different way of approaching radicalisation is via counterpublics theory: such counterpublics are often defined in relation to …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my great colleague Ehsan Dehghan, whose focus is on sedimented polarisation across Reddit collectives. To what extent is there cross-ideological interaction on the platform? What forms does such interaction take: how deliberative or antagonistic is it?

Indeed, what do we mean by cross-ideological interaction? This could mean information sharing, cross-posting, cross-commenting, cross-linking between subreddits, or other discursive patterns. The project drew on a dataset of activity over 16 years across 11 subreddits, containing 6.2 million submissions from 801,000 authors and nearly 200 million comments from 5.5 million authors …