Polarisation

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Quirin Ryffel, whose interest is in the impact of argument exposure on polarisation. Affective polarisation between two opinion groups based on issue-specific positions is in part driven by a horizontal dislike between those groups; individuals in one group perceive other groups to be different from them, and this can generate out-group animosity as well as increase in-group favouritism.

Wheat happens when these groups encounter each other’s arguments, then? Intercrop contact theory suggests that groups might lead to a recognition of commonalities and a reduction of fear …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Niels Mede, whose interest is in public trust in climate scientists; his paper builds on data from a global survey on trust in science, including climate science. Overall, trust in science is actually quite solid, but is also turning increasingly polarised in parts of the population; climate science is a particular battlefield here.

What people, and what publics, are divided about climate science, then? Divisions largely follow partisan ideological lines; elite cues and identity sustain that divide, and fuel this division. Trust in climate scientists is …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on evidence use in polarised climate reporting. Climate news is highly polarised, and this mirrors broader polarisation in the news landscape. However, such polarisation is not always a problem – agitation for progress is entirely legitimate, for instance, and diverging views are a natural part of healthy political debate. However, this can turn to destructive polarisation.

The analysis of news polarisation is often focussed on polarisation amongst news audiences; the assessment of news content for evidence of polarisation …

The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on polarisation around climate change, and starts with my colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. She begins by outlining recent developments in climate policy in Australia, and especially the discussions and disinformation about net zero policy, renewable energies, and the role of nuclear power in the energy mix.

Carly engaged in an LLM-assisted discourse analysis of submissions to the Australian federal parliament’s recent inquiry into nuclear power; she worked with the Claude LLM to code the submitters and their stances, the claims about nuclear and other energy sources being made, and the …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Nico Spreen, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by populist parties in Germany during the 2025 federal election. TikTok may be expected to be especially valuable as a campaigning tool for populist parties, given its personalised, emotionalised, and algorithmically amplified content processes. Also, both the left-wing Linke and far-right AfD are especially popular with voters under 25, so there is substantial overlap between their voter bases and the TikTok userbase.

What shape does their populist communication take, then? Such communication usually employs people-centrism, anti-elitism, and an exclusion …

It’s a sunny Wednesday in Brno, and we’re starting the ECREA 2026 conference proper now. I’m in a session on the political uses of TikTok, which begins with Eduard-Claudiu Gross, on the situation in Romania. Romania annulled the first round of its presidential election in December 2024, due to a massive Russian election interference campaign, and TikTok played a role in this; the re-run in May 2025 took place in this complicated and polarised political and media environment.

This study, then, gathered some 50,000 TikTok videos from June 2024 to March 2025, from 1,000 authors, and from these examined the …

My own presentation, on behalf of a much larger team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, concluded the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno. For this, we set ourselves an ambitious task: first, given the increasing fragmentation of social media activity across a growing number of platforms, we wanted to explore how we might conduct a true cross-platform analysis of public discussions around the 2025 Australian election campaign, using data from platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.

Second, because this meant using the Meta Content Library for access to candidates' and …

We’re into the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno, and I’ll be the final presenter (with slides coming soon). We start, though, with Jan Křovák, whose focus is on populism in the 2025 German and Czech elections.

He begins by describing populism as a communication strategy which is anti-elite and against out-groups, and which has become more mainstream in recent years – mainstream parties confronted by populist challengers have increasingly adopted populist rhetoric, while populist parties themselves have also become more mainstream in their electoral appeal.

This has played out very differently in …

And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the São Paulo mayoral elections in 2024. These were the first elections after the divisive 2022 federal election and 2023 coup attempt led by disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, and therefore also served as a kind of barometer for the political mood in the country.

Bruna’s interest here is in how this intersects with Meta’s stated policy to reduce the amount of political content made visible in its users’ Facebook, and later also Instagram, feeds; the …