The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

Incivility on TikTok might be driven by the high level of anonymity and algorithmic amplification on the platform, and is likely to reflect perpetrators’ partisan identity; this may also be asymmetric between Republicans and Democrats. Incivility is also perpetrated in order to gain social …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Seo Yoon Lee, whose interest is in toxic communicative behaviours, and especially counter-normative opinion expression in online communities. Such community dissidents are often understood as online trolls seeking to introduce community chaos, but this behaviour can be seen as both toxic or constructive: it is toxic if it is done simply to disrupt and aggravate, but constructive if it genuinely seeks to highlight alternative views.

The present study explores this in the context of the polarised issue of climate change. Here, social identity theory points to the existence of in-group …

The next ICA 2024 conference session is on incivility in digital environments, and starts with Stephanie Bührer, presenting a scoping review on digital hate. This includes any kind of digitally disseminated hostile content directed against individuals or collectives, and includes forms such as cyberbullying, online incivility, online hate speech, trolling, harassment, and other phenomena.

Such concepts are often operationalised very inconsistently and interchangeably. Various of these behaviours are conflated, while certain concepts are understood in very different ways by different studies. The present study categories such forms of digital hate as either holistic or specific: comprised of a range of …

p>The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Frederik Henriksen, whose focus is on the transformation of far-right political activities on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The far-right shifted the focus of its activities during this time, and joined forces with other anti-systemic actors, particularly pushing mis- and disinformation on the pandemic and the health measures implemented by governments to address it.

The present study sought to identify these discursive shifts in response to the pandemic, amongst far-right actors in Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden and across multiple social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Gab, VKontakte, Reddit …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Baoning Gong, whose interest is in the social media activities of the German far right across a range of platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Gettr. This cross-platform focus is important because they all form part of a far-right online ecosystem, but single-platform studies still dominant the research literature. Far-right actors are well-known for moving between platforms if their accounts are banned from any one platform.

Baoning’s work explores the opportunity structures of these three platforms for far-right movements, then: the specific configurations of technological communicative, regulatory, economic, and user …

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.

Indeed, engagement with the Sweden Democrats’ social media activities is substantial; their accounts reach a large and especially young audience …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Bingbing Zhang, whose focus is on perceptions of how political homophilous other people’s social networks are; such unrealistic perceptions could then lead to unfounded beliefs about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’.

This might also be related to perceptions of media biases against one’s own political views: if media are believed to be biased, then this might also be seen as a reason for the emergence of such ‘echo chambers’. Greater political homophily social distance is therefore also assumed to relate to media bias perceptions and media scepticism.

The project …

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this …