We continue this second day of the ECREA 2024 conference with the second conference keynote, by Jelena Kleut. Her focus is on uncertainties in transitional media systems. She begins by noting the various present-day communicative disorders – disinformation, political dysfunction, hate speech and abuse, etc. – but also warns us not to lose track of the positive potentials of contemporary communication technologies amongst all the doom and gloom. A balanced assessment of the current situation remains critical.
This points to a considerable level of uncertainty, too – and this can be generative (of research, and of overall progress for society) …
The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dennis Andersson, whose interest is in the effect of ideological news use in Sweden. The observation that people hold diametrically opposed beliefs about where society is heading is not new, and predates online and social media use; education and other socioeconomic factors, as well as news media use, are often seen as factors in influencing citizens’ belief structures. Increasingly, sociocultural dimensions – such as attitudes on environmental, gender equality, and migration policies – are also recognised as important dimensions here, however.
These may be reflected in ideological news media consumption patterns …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Nuri Sadida, whose focus is on the impact of ‘fake news’ and media literacy on affective polarisation in Indonesia. Such affective polarisation has increased in Indonesia over the past ten years, especially in the context of elections; derogatory nicknames for out-groups, such as ‘tadpole’ or ‘desert lizard’, are common especially in social media conversations.
This may be seen as merely playful, but could also point to a residue of hate speech in Indonesian public discourse. Indeed, there are signs of increasing divorce rates in Indonesia due to poltical differences between spouses …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Emma Turkenburg, who begins by highlighting growing concerns about affective polarisation. The worry here is that such polarisation has social as well as political consequences, yet the evidence for such political consequences is mixed; the growth and decline of polarisation in specific societies is highly context-bound and dynamic.
Elections provide a useful backdrop against which these dynamics can be studied: they make politics more salient, and highlight political differences between actors. A useful measure to explore here is certainty of vote: how certain citizens are about whom they should vote for …
The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session are Tomasz Gackowski and his colleague whose name I did not catch; they begin by pointing to the considerable volume of research on social polarisation, and are especially interested in how such dynamics play out in Poland. They worked with a politically representative sample of residents in a major city in Poland, who were confronted with a range of anonymised quotations from politicians about the situation in Poland and Europe. Eye- and facetracking was used to assess their reactions at this point, and again when the author of each quotation was revealed …
The second day at ECREA 2024 starts with yet another panel on polarisation, with begins with a paper by Diógenes Lycarião. His interest is in testing the hypothesis that digitalisation and platformisation are fragmenting the public sphere. This is critical since much of the scholarly discussion on this public sphere fragmentation hypothesis to date builds on unverified assumptions. This has two elements: the idea that the expansion of the mediasphere fragments the public sphere, and the suggestion that this then causes phenomena such as ‘echo chambers’ or polarisation.
First, then, is an expansion in media choice actually fragmenting the public …
The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Mikkel Bækby Johansen, whose interest is in hybridisation of extremism on social media. Hybridisation is a term which has emerged from terrorism studies, pointing to the increasingly complex nature of terrorist threats; however, the role of social media in such hybridisation remains poorly understood. Hybridisation connects ideological and religious views with conspiracist beliefs and concepts of who the enemy is; QAnon is a useful example of this more complex and potentially contradictory form of extremism.
Extremism is now especially closely linked to conspiracy theories, and conspiracy beliefs often end up being …
Up next in this ECREA 2024 session is the excellent Giovanni Boccia Artieri, whose interest is in networking between fringe Telegram channels in Italy. These are connected to disinformation ecosystems, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the normalisation of populism and political extremism. Fringe online spaces can especially serve as laboratories for extremist narratives here – even though they can also provide a safe space for marginalised and disadvantaged communities.
The present study examines the fringe Telegramsphere in Italy, but eventually also aims to study its interconnections with mainstream media. Telegram is already know for fostering affective polarisation, spreading alternative …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Azade Kakavand, whose interest is in mapping far-right voices across platforms. This is methodologically difficult, and requires a matching of user identities across platforms – especially also because far-right actors are well-known for using multiple platforms for a variety of distinct purposes.
The present study employs the process of user identity linkage (UIL), which was developed in computer science for user profiling, marketing, and cybersecurity purposes. Here, however, the approach is not limited to natural persons but is applied to human and non-human accounts of any kind. The project draws on …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Aytalina Kulichkina, whose focus is on the role of social media in authoritarian settings. Social media have been prominent for protests in such contexts, but have also been used by regimes to suppress and undermine protests as well as to identify protesters. The picture remains blurry due to the many contextual differences, the various platforms used, changes over time, and other differing factors, however.
Aytalina therefore conducted a literature review of existing work on these questions, covering the years from 1997 to 2023. Searching for a broad range of keywords in …
