Elections

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by Queensland state politicians in the lead-up to the October 2024 election. Even in spite of moves to ban TikTok in government departments and at the federal level for security reasons, candidates have been active on TikTok, and have been using it to build an ‘authentic’ personal brand – which requires immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness.

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on the propaganda of tomorrow. How might we democratise AI, and what does it mean for political systems?

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Heesoo Jang, whose interest is in the potential biases in Large Language Models. In the United States, a majority of Republican nominees for office in the last mid-term elections denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and in Brazil similar election denialist groups have emerged. This is worsened by political attacks on press freedoms in these and other countries; globally, the challenges to democracies by the rise of far-right authoritarianism are growing. But most existing theories and concepts still focus on ‘stable’ democracies, wherever we might still be able to find them. Out approaches now need to centre normative democratic commitments.

The post-lunch session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose interest is in measuring polarising discourses during election campaigns. Tariq and the team have developed a method to measure polarisation at the level of specific discourses: it is rooted in core principles and operationalised approaches that are adaptable to other contexts. Measuring polarisation at the discourse level is important; so far, so much of the work on polarisation has been done using surveys on self-reported political positioning or feelings towards leaders or parties, or has drawn on voting patterns in parliaments – but in recent years there has been a growth in attention to polarising rhetoric.

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Jing Zeng, whose focus is on Trumpism in the online Sinosphere. There was a lot of public animosity between presidents Trump and Xi during Trump’s term in office, but there also appears to be a surprising amount of support for Trump both within China as well as in the Chinese diaspora around the world. Chinese-Americans were one of the groups of Asian-Americans with the greatest amount of support for Trump, in fact.

The final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session for today starts with Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the political uses of TikTok. Here, she is focussing especially on the use of the platform by individual politicians in the last Queensland election – which continued even though there were increasing moves to ban the platform in Australia, especially by political actors.