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 …

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

People using social media data come from a very wide range of disciplines and bring diverse perspectives to the research; in addition to creating quite a bit of confusion, this can also support the creation of new approaches and epistemologies, and will benefit from a pragmatic and even pragmaticist approach to …

The final speaker in this session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the fabulous Annett Heft, whose focus is on patterns and dynamics of conspiracy theories (as part of the Neovex project), and especially on how these spread from the fringes to more mainstream visibility, not least also via social media.

Every digital platform shapes the dissemination of conspiracy theories in different ways, depending on its specific communicative affordances, and of course these platforms are also interconnected and integrated into a multi-platform communicative environment. How do the linguistic styles of conspiracist communication differ across platforms, then, and how …

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Eckehard Olbrich, whose focus is on the evidence for polarisation in the German Twittersphere. This seeks to evaluate the claims about the role of social media as a driver of polarisation, and to address the negative impacts of such polarisation if such polarisation is indeed present. Polarisation might exist at issue, ideological, or affective levels, and these levels also intersect with each other, of course.

Taking the German Twitter data as a starting point, then, what are the issues that are being discussed, and what evidence for polarisation is …