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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 next presentation in this AoIR 2024 conference session is by Constantin Paschertz and Christian Schneider, whose focus is on populist German politics on TikTok in the Bavarian state election in 2023. The use of social media in political campaigning is not new, of course, but German parties have tended to be hesitant to use TikTok for this – out of concerns about the Chinese ownership and dubious data practices of the platform.

But some 15% of German online users now also use TikTok for news (and this particularly includes first-time voters), and especially the fascist AfD party has moved …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Sally-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in the intersection between platforms and politics. There have now been several years of critical discussion around this troubled intersection, and a growing legitimacy crisis four such platforms. Much of this is related to electoral politics, especially as platforms are now widely used to talk about election – and to intervene in electoral politics in legitimate and illegitimate ways.

Platforms themselves are not neutral in this: the privilege and promote certain styles of communication, and political communication has thereby been platformed; meanwhile, political …

The next session at this AoIR 2024 conference is on elections, and starts with a paper by Carlos Entrena Serrano, whose focus is on the use of TikTok for political and social issues content. He begins by noting that social media were initially advertised as a space for social connection, but with the move to a video-first social media experience this has shifted considerably towards the algorithmic curation of content experiences for users. Users still have some agency in this, however, and this scan be understood as a process of consumptive curation, where networked individuals navigate pools of data in …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alma Kalisky, whose focus is on ‘flat earther’ conspiracist communities. Overall, conspiracist beliefs can have significant negative consequences at the personal, social, and societal level, but also provide a ground for community formation and social connection; at the individual and communal level, we must better understand what attracts people to these conspiracy communities.

Conspiracy believers often come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, have low interpersonal and political trust, and are often perceived as paranoid and dangerous; the emotional belonging that they experience is much less understood: conspiracy groups are communities for …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Rob Topinka, whose focus is on conspiracy theories that are promoted by reactionary ideological entrepreneurs like Russell Brand. Their rhetoric doesn’t need to make any positive propositions: all they need to do is point out things that (in their view) have ‘gone too far’, in in doing so position themselves as bold new heroes who speak for ‘the people’; this can be understood as a new and reactionary form of counter-culture.

People like Brand have gradually moved further into this milieu, and are spouting increasingly far-right rhetoric; they also position …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the conversation between then-Dutch PM Mark Rutte and historian Yuval Harari at the 2020 World Economic Forum, comparing their utopian and dystopian viscous about AI – and this kicked off a new round of conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum as well as the future uses of AI to subjugate global populations.

The WEF is a common target for such conspiracy theorists – its concepts and ideas, including the “Great Reset”, are frequently distorted into anti-WEF narratives, including by prominent far-right politicians and …

Day two at the AoIR 2024 conference starts for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, which is opened by Daniël de Zeeuw. His focus is on the growth of the use of the term PsyOp, or psychological operation – these are usually military or government operations to change public opinion through unconventional means. Conspiracy theories about PsyOps have been pushed increasingly especially by far-right actors in the U.S., including Fox News, and often originate from 4chan; there is a substantial increase especially from 2016 onwards.

But through this process the term PsyOp has also lost its core meaning …

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 …