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And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Giada Marino, presenting outcomes from the Italian I-POLHYS project led by Laura Iannelli which researched polarisation in hybrid media’s systems. A key focus of the project was on the potential interconnections between problematic information and mass polarisation; it began with a systematic literature review on these connections, which focussed on some 68 relevant articles (out of a much larger number that used these terms as buzzwords but did not operationalise them in any rigorous way, or confused them with other concepts) …

The next speakers at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference are my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard and Samantha Vilkins, presenting the emerging findings from an ongoing literature review of the concept of populism, continuing on from our review of the polarisation concept. Contrary to polarisation, populism is rather more clearly defined, with works by Mudde and Laclau emerging as particularly central if somewhat competing definitions.

These variously define populism as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde) and discursive opposition between the elites and the people (Laclau); such definitions have been applied to populist phenomena in media, medicine, religion, and other …

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Christian Baden, whose focus is on propaganda a as social process. Much of the work on propaganda remains very technical, and there is a need to move beyond this; propaganda is now again a major topic in research, with work having increased substantially since the mid-2010s. But it should not be equated simplistically with mis- and disinformation or ‘fake news’, or addressed only through fact-checks; this alone is not going to work.

False information is only a small part of propaganda: propaganda is systemic, disseminated by actors …

The third speaker in this opening plenary at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the great Daniel Kreiss, who shifts our focus to the role of tech firms in the context of democratic challenges. They may be seen as ‘democratic gatekeepers’, potentially playing a crucial role in keeping anti-democratic leaders and parties from power. Democracies are saved when there are strong political institutions to save them, but these institutions need to include media organisations and platforms as well.

Journalists are ‘civil gatekeepers’, then, who communicate ideas to the public about what is and is not democratic; when …

I’ve stepped in as the presenter of the second paper in this opening session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference – unfortunately my colleague Katharina Esau, who was meant to present today, has fallen ill. The work we are presenting here is one of the early conceptual outcomes of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship on partisanship and polarisation, and both explores the concept of polarisation as current literature from a variety of fields describes it, and outlines five key symptoms of what we define as destructive polarisation that require further scholarly attention and empirical analysis.