Polarisation

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Liu Youmeng, whose interest is also in the impact of social media on affective polarisation in the Chinese public sphere. Indeed, high-choice media environments may generally increase affective polarisation, and selective exposure to pro-attitudinal content may have a significant role to play here. Individuals’ perceptions about the underlying opinion climate may also affect this, however.

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in the impact of social media affordances on polarisation. This addresses the lack of cross-platform studies on polarisation in platforms, as well as the lack of work on non-western political contexts; the project therefore examines five controversial debates on three Chinese social media platforms.

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

The Wednesday at IAMCR 2024 starts with a paper by Yiming Liu, whose interest is in the interplay between moralised discussion and group polarisation. She begins by noting that deliberation within a structured moral framework can effectively reduce polarisation; morality can therefore be part of the solution to group polarisation.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Ferruh Yılmaz, whose interest is in far-right strategies for dealing with Critical Race Theory. He begins by noting the differences between culture and policy: people attach themselves to broader political and social identities at least as much as they do to good policies on specific issues.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Christian Baden, who begins by noting that propaganda has become a substantially growing concern again in recent years. Propaganda is more than just ‘fake news’, of course: it may provide actual facts, but out of context or with a biased spin, for example, and false information is often only used around the margins to enhance the propagandistic effect and establish epistemic authority.

The next session at IAMCR 2024 is on media framing, and we start with Henri Mütschele, whose interest is in the German media portrayals of the Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation protest movements in the ‘protest winter’ of 2022/23. Germany has a long tradition of climate protests, but these groups have very different approaches to their protests: from socially acceptable demonstrations to more radical and disruptive blockage actions.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides: