Polarisation

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.

The mechanism here is that a position that an individual would not normally support is framed in a way that is consistent with their moral values, and thereby fosters consensus. But a moral appeal is not always productive: it can also introduce a binary distinction between good and bad, right …

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.

Far-right populism builds on this by weaponising an affective rhetorical strategy: it promotes moral panics about cultural and moral issues that channels people’s diffused anxieties into a sense of unity against social elites, which transforms their ontological vision of society into a perception of …

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.

Propaganda is therefore defined here as strategically planned public communication on political issues that claims a monopoly of truth and delegitimises dissent. This extends well beyond specific contexts …

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.

In winter 2022/23, against the context of the European energy crisis brought on by the Russian war on Ukraine, there was a heightened rate of protests by such groups, and these …

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.

From this perspective, elite narratives from one or another side of politics can influence media narratives, and this in turn influences public narratives; there is therefore likely to be a narrative competition between elites as they seek …

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.

This may be aided by the anonymity and algorithmic shaping of social media feeds. To examine this, this study gathered some 5,000 posts and 67,000 reposts from Weibo about this incident, and found strong engagement in the early days after the event, with decline in activity after a few days …

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:

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system …

The next speaker at the final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is the excellent Helena Rauxloh, with a paper on radical climate protests. Just recently, for example, the Just Stop Oil protest group recently defaced the Stonehenge standing stones, and received some very negative news headlines for this action – yet many of the headlines covering these protests did not even identify what these protests were about. Such radical protests can be compared against more conventional and largely non-disruptive protests like Fridays for Future.

These protests engage with journalism as an arena for and driver of polarisation …

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.

Italy has a multi-party political system with a variety of parties. The 2018 election was won by the populist Five Star Movement, governing together with the far-right Lega. In 2022, a coalition of right-wing and far-right parties …