Twitter

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 presented the next paper, which explored the evidence for polarisation in news recommendations from Google News, building on our Australian Search Experience project in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S):

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

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.

The next session at the AoIR 2024 conference conference is a session that I co-organised which focusses on controversies, and starts with a presentation by Felipe Soares. His focus is on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, which finally brought the reign of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to an end.

The final day at ECREA 2024 begins for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, and a paper by the great Annett Heft. Her focus is on the diffusion dynamics of conspiracy theories across platforms. She begins by noting the substantial growth in conspiracy theory diffusion, and the severe consequences these ideas can have. Cross-platform activity (involving social media, social messaging, multimedia platforms, alternative news media, and mainstream media) can further heighten this impact.

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.

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 next ECREA 2024 session is also on polarisation, and I’m chairing as well as blogging it. We start with Petra de Place Bak, whose interest is in the cognitive preferences that make specific types of online content more salient and shareable. One aspect of this might be sentiment- and emotion-based biases.

The post-lunch session on this first day of ECREA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in the case of disruptive climate protests. Such protests, in Germany for instance by the Letzte Generation protest group, tend to attract controversial media coverage, and it may be such coverage rather than the protests themselves that drive polarisation dynamics.