The next session at ECREA 2024 that I’m attending is on communication in times of illiberalism, and starts with Natalie-Anne Hall. Her focus is on political engagement around Brexit on Facebook, in the post-referendum period between 2017 and 2019. Rather than gathering Facebook content, this study focussed on Facebook users – in recognition of the fact that Facebook remains the leading mainstream social network in the UK.

The post-Brexit context was ripe for populist discursive appeals, which claimed that political elites were attempting to undermine the Brexit referendum results; this was actively fanned by illiberal and often also racist groups …

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.

This may be seen as merely playful, but could also point to a residue of hate speech in Indonesian public discourse. Indeed, there are signs of increasing divorce rates in Indonesia due to poltical differences between spouses …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Emma Turkenburg, who begins by highlighting growing concerns about affective polarisation. The worry here is that such polarisation has social as well as political consequences, yet the evidence for such political consequences is mixed; the growth and decline of polarisation in specific societies is highly context-bound and dynamic.

Elections provide a useful backdrop against which these dynamics can be studied: they make politics more salient, and highlight political differences between actors. A useful measure to explore here is certainty of vote: how certain citizens are about whom they should vote for …

And my own paper on ten years of the #auspol hashtag on Twitter is next at Social Media & Society 2024. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …

It’s been a busy week, but we’ve reached the final session of the IAMCR 2024 conference in Christchurch, which begins with a paper by Samiksha Koirala and Soumik Pal on the use of social media in political campaigning in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. They begin by noting the domination of South Asian politics by long-lived political dynasties; however, the emergence of social media as a campaigning space has begun to disrupt such structures.

This is also aided by growing Internet penetration and the widespread use of various social media platforms. Emerging political parties, especially also catering to younger voters, are …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Chen-ling Hung, whose focus is on Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan during the presidential election on 13 January 2024. Given its exposed position at the frontier between democracy and autocracy, Taiwan is most targetted by foreign disinformation attacks, yet remains a democratic country with the highest level of press freedom in Asia; there is considerable social awareness of disinformation challenges.

This study examined the means and themes of Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan, and the responses to this from Taiwanese society. It centrally builds on the concept of democratic resilience …

The third presenter in this IAMCR 2024 session is Joanne Kuai, whose interest is in LLM-powered chat bots and search engines. There is a considerable shift now underway in search: instead of presenting a list of search results, search engines are gradually moving towards the presentation of a summary of the search topic, with references attached. This is true for Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Baidu search, and especially important as more than half the world’s population participates in elections in 2024.

This project focussed on results from Microsoft Copilot on the Taiwanese presidential election earlier in 2024. In particular …