A Clutch of Presentations from ICA 2023

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The slides alone may not do it justice, but there’s a huge amount of work behind this analysis of a broad range of affective signalling by lead election candidates in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú, and the patterns that are emerging from this are fascinating. Still more work to do in analysing and processing this, but expect more insights from this research at a conference near you soon…

Sebastian Svegaard, Tariq Choucair, Kate O'Connor Farfan, and Axel Bruns. “Affective Polarisation in Political Leaders' Discourses: A Comparison between Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 preconference Comparative Digital Political Communication: Comparisons across Countries, Platforms, and Time, Toronto, 25 May 2023.

Also part of our Laureate project, in the main ICA conference itself my colleague Katharina Esau presented our foundational overview of the diverse forms of polarisation that have been identified the key literature to date. Beyond that literature review itself, we’re also developing a conceptual framework to determine when exactly ordinary, everyday political polarisation (which is not in itself necessarily problematic) actually turns destructive – also a question which I’m sure we’ll pursue in more detail in future publications.

Katharina Esau, Tariq Choucair, Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, Axel Bruns, Kate O'Connor, and Carly Lubicz. “Destructive Political Polarisation in the Context of Digital Communication – A Critical Literature Review and Conceptual Framework.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 conference, Toronto, 30 May 2023.

I presented a final paper that is broadly related to the Laureate project together with my colleagues Ehsan Dehghan and Dan Angus, on behalf of a larger team and in a panel organised by Risto Kunelius (and somewhat delayed by a fire alarm, of all things…). Here, we examine the structure of interactions between accounts participating in the Twitter debate accompanying the COP26 and COP27 climate summits. Some very interesting differences between the two events, partly related to their event locations in Glasgow and Sharm-el-Sheikh, respectively, and some interesting challenges in comparing the two events.

Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Ehsan Dehghan, and Daniel Angus. “Networks of Agonism and Antagonism: Polarised Discourses about COP26 (and COP27) on Twitter.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 conference, Toronto, 27 May 2023.

And finally, my colleague Sofya Glazunova also presented our methodologically complex and innovative study of the various actions social media platforms have (or have not) taken against Russian state propaganda outlets since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Here we examined the policing of a sizeable number of RT and Sputnik accounts, across six platforms and in ten countries, and the results are highly variable – even in the same country and on the same platform, accounts are occasionally policed in different ways.

I’m pleased to say that this study has now also been published as an article in Internet Policy Review – more on that and some other recent publications in a later post.

Sofya Glazunova, Anna Ryzhova, Axel Bruns, Silvia Ximena Montaña-Niño, Arista Beseler, and Ehsan Dehghan. “A Platform Policy Implementation Audit of Actions against Russia’s State-Controlled Media.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 conference, Toronto, 30 May 2023.

Sofya Glazunova, Anna Ryzhova, Axel Bruns, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Arista Beseler, and Ehsan Dehghan. "A Platform Policy Implementation Audit of Actions against Russia’s State-Controlled Media." Internet Policy Review 12.2 (2023). DOI: 10.14763/2023.2.1711.

Anyway, that’s probably enough in new presentations for the moment – as I’ve said, more shortly as I head to Lyon for IAMCR 2023 to present some more of our work.