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Polarisation

Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 11:46

Patterns of Polarisation on Chinese Social Media Platforms

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in polarisation in hybrid media systems. She notes the specificity of polarisation patterns to specific media and political systems; observations from the US do not translate easily to other countries, for example. How might polarisation unfold in as tightly controlled a media system as China’s, for instance?

Discursive power in China is distributed across state-owned mainstream media, other commercial media, individual influencers on social media, and ordinary users on social media platforms. Such platforms include Weibo, WeChat, and leading Q&A platform …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 11:44

Affective Polarisation amongst US Political Partisans on Reddit

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

My second day at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts with a session on polarisation and media effects, which begins with a paper by Rachel Neo and Benjamin Johnson, whose focus is on affective polarisation on Reddit in the US. The US is now deeply polarised, and this also expresses in incivility from both sides of politics. Such incivility is visible in disrespectful exchanges between partisans, which is often expressed affectively.

This is a case of affective polarisation: positive feelings towards the in-group, and negative feelings towards the out-group. Reddit is one space online where this can be seen …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 19:04

National Identity as a Divisive Factor: Chinese Attitudes towards Chinese Traditional Medicine

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jinzhuo Liu, whose focus is on affective polarisation in online discussions about Chinese traditional medicine. Is this reduced by shared national identity? The mechanism to explain such a tendency would be the Common In-group Identity Model.

Affective polarisation between opinion-based groups results in the formation or identification of in- and out-groups, treating each other in hostile ways. This is often also observed in online engagement between such groups. Such groups nonetheless foster cross-cutting discussions online; such exposure to opposing views may only increase polarisation between them …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 19:02

Reviewing the Diverging Definitions of Populism in Scholarly Research

Politics | Polarisation | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my great QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting progress findings from a large literature review on populism. We have previously observed how poorly defined the concept of polarisation is in the literature; there are many forms of polarisation that scholars have identified, but hardly and overarching perspectives.

This project took a similar approach to the concept of populism, which turns out to be better defined; dominant in this is Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin ideology that highlights divisions between ‘us’ …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 19:01

The Split Communication Strategies of the French Far Right

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Twitter | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 19:00

Political Scandals as a Clash of Trust Cultures

Politics | Polarisation | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

For the last session on this opening day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m at a session on populism and propaganda, and we start with Karl Mendoza. He highlights the importance of trust, and the way that trust can fracture at times of scandal. When trust breaks down in a democracy, what exactly is if that people stop believing in – democracy itself, the system, its actors?

Scandals are often seen as breaches of ethics or governance, but they also activate competing moral grammars: in deeply divided democracies, trust does not simply divide – it polarises. Trust is …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 18:59

The Curious Case of Environmental Nationalism in China

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog | Movies |

The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.

Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 18:50

Using Practice Mapping to Study Climate Debates on Facebook

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.

How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 18:47

Understanding the Role of Communication in Addressing the Energy Transition

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.

Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in …

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Snurb — Sunday 13 July 2025 15:19

How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping (IAMCR 2025)

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 |
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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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