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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 23:01

Skewed Patterns of News Posting and Engagement on Instagram

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | IAMCR 2023 |

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping. The net effect is potentially the end of the mass audience for the news.

The present project, then, explored the Instagram pages of some 662 global news publishers from 50 …

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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 19:56

The Dark Communication Repertoires of COVID-19 Protesters in Austria

Politics | Social Media | Facebook | Crisis Communication | Twitter | IAMCR 2023 |

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

It is possible to distinguish between different actors in this, though: innovators, early adopters, and followers; as well as politicians …

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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 19:52

Anti-Elite Rhetoric in the Facebook Posts of Spanish and Portuguese Populist Parties

Politics | Social Media | Facebook | IAMCR 2023 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on how the Portuguese and Spanish populist parties Chega and Vox construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ in their political discourse. Vox’s rise in Spain was party driven by the Catalan independence crisis and the growing European migration crisis; Chega mainly benefitted from internal political turmoil in Portugal.

The present paper examined the Facebook posts from both parties in January to March 2023, drawing on some 240-280 posts from each party. For Vox, these featured (in order of importance) anti-minority (including migrants as well as women …

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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 06:20

Affective Polarisation in the Facebook Posts of Danish and Brazilian Political Leaders

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2023 |

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

Affective polarisation in the communication of political leaders in Brazil and Denmark from Svegaard1

This project examined the Brazilian and Danish elections of 2022, with particular focus on the leading contenders in each election: Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, and Ellemann-Jensen and Frederiksen in Denmark. We collected the Facebook posts by these leaders, using CrowdTangle, and engaged in a manual coding (by a Brazilian and a Dane) of these posts …

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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 06:18

The Evolution of Political Polarisation in Brazil during the Bolsonaro Years

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | IAMCR 2023 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.

Analysis of Facebook data from 2013 and 2014 seems to support such patterns: after the major protests in 2013, there …

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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 06:16

Four Dimensions for the Empirical Assessment of Polarisation

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2023 |

My presentation was up next at IAMCR 2023, and outlines the overall agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are the slides:

Towards a New Empiricism: Polarisation across Four Dimensions from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Wednesday 12 July 2023 06:10

Shifting Patterns of Polarisation in Spain and Catalunya as New Parties Enter Politics

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | IAMCR 2023 |

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else. Spain has seen the emergence of several new parties, and this shifts the structure of the overall party system considerably.

New parties include centrist parties, extreme left parties, and far right parties …

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Snurb — Tuesday 11 July 2023 23:18

Spanish News Consumption Habits during COVID-19

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | IAMCR 2023 |

Next up at IAMCR 2023 are Aleix Martí and Roger Cuartielles, whose focus is on the circulation of information in Spain during the COVID-19 crisis. Legacy media as well as social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram played key roles in this infodemic. Social media in particular played a disintermediating role, enabling the further spread of mis- and disinformation.

The present project sought to explore the information consumption habits of Spanish news users, including the role of social media, the perception of disinformation, and the perception of official information channels. It approached this through a survey of some 1,000 …

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Snurb — Tuesday 11 July 2023 17:51

Information Cocoons on Sina Weibo?

Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | IAMCR 2023 |

The final presenter in this IAMCR 2023 session is Junjun Yu, whose focus is on information cocoons on Sina Weibo. Such cocoons are theorised as close-off spaces where information circulates in an ideologically and informationally homogeneous environment, potentially facilitated by the algorithms and affordances of social media platforms.

Such information cocoons could be identified based on the homogeneity of their selection, their content, or their participants; the present study focusses on the content, in the context of Sina Weibo. It examines the degree of content homogeneity for each user; the posts by a user on the platform; the top information …

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Snurb — Tuesday 11 July 2023 17:47

The Dynamics of Antagonism in Controversial Online Discourse

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | IAMCR 2023 |

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.

Time and dynamics are dimensions with their own logics here, and lead to a divergence of discourses within online talk. What emerges here (and Svetlana …

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