Polarisation

And the final speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on coding Italian news data using Large Language Models. This worked with some 85,000 news articles shared on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections, and first classified such URLs as political or non-political; it then produced and clustered text embeddings for these articles, and used GPT-4-turbo to classify the dominant topics in these clusters.

This required considerable prompt crafting, especially also to ensure that prompts remained within the LLM’s token limits. Key challenges here included the choice of LLM …

The next speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in detecting stances in climate change coverage. This focusses especially on climate change debates in German news media, focussing on climate protests, discussions about speed limits, and discussions about heating and heat pump regulations.

Here stances might be better understood as evaluations related to a given issue or policy, and Large Language Models can be useful tools in assessing this, but this also requires considerable prompt crafting in order to generate consistent results. Computational costs for doing so (especially with complex prompts) …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is especially on the use of LLMs in stance detection in news content. A stance is a public act by a social actors, achieved dialogically through communication, which evaluates objects, positions the self and other subjects, and aligns with other subjects within a sociocultural field.

Here, the focus is broadly on stances towards issues, persons, groups, and organisations. There are some tools for doing so, but they mainly focus on English-language content, are designed for specific types of data, and tend …

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference that I’m in is on historicising the far right, which clearly is a much-needed activity under current circumstances. We start with Kevan Feshami, whose interest is in white nationalism. White nationalist groups are themselves engaged in producing a narrative of their own history, in order to then be able to encourage their followers to be, or become, what they think their historical identity ought to be.

This project itself goes back hundreds of years. White nationalism is defined by a belief in a unifying racial identity; a perceived connection to land and …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation. Such breakdown might manifest as an absence of communication between opposing sides, and this is difficult to identify empirically if all we have is trace data about active communication processes.

This project focusses on comments, ‘love’ and ‘angry’ reactions, and shares on Facebook as indicators of affective polarisation on …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the brilliant Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the fundamental changes to the abortion debate in the United States since the current Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling. Abortion has been a highly polarising issue in the US ever since women’s reproductive rights fell under legal jurisdiction in the 1800s, of course, and is tangled up with American nation-building mythologies.

Ever since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, there has been a consistent effort to push back against its consequences, especially from the conservative right; this is …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Alia Azmi, whose focus is on the campaign to address sexual violence in Indonesia. For various sociocultural reasons, Indonesia did not engage much with the global #metoo movement; the defamation laws and victim blaming practices have generally deterred victim-survivors to speak out against sexual violence. Indonesia also did not have any strong laws against sexual violence.

A new bill addressing sexual violence was proposed in 2016, and remained stuck in parliamentary processes for several years; clauses about inability to give consent in particular were interpreted by conservative …