Polarisation

Third in this AoIR 2023 session is Reed van Schenck, whose interest is in the decline and reconstitution of the US alt-right after 2017 – from the ‘tiki torch’ marches to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt. A particular focus here is on Telegram, but much of the research so far has examined only the public Telegram channels, and not its private and secret channels where potentially even more problematic activities may be taking place.

The second paper in this AoIR 2023 session is by Marco Bastos and Raquel Recuero, whose focus is on the 8 January 2022 insurrection in Brazil, after the election loss of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. They describe this insurrection as a form of connective action: a framework that has largely been applied to pro-social actions like Occupy or the Indignados, but can also be used to analyse anti-democratic actions.

It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States.

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides:

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Alena Kluknavská, whose interest is in truth contestation on Facebook during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; it approaches this through a country-comparative study involving several European nations (Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland). Truth contestation is especially prominent during crises, but we know very little about the dynamics between contestants in this process.

The next presentation in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is by Laura Jacobs, who begins by outlining the function of political in- and out-group identification and its links to polarisation and conflict in society. Political parties make use of in- and out-group appeals in their messaging, and may also draw on populism in constructing ‘us vs. them’ oppositions.

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Jihye Park, whose interest is in the role of media trust in reducing affective polarisation. Exposure to cross-cutting media has been recognised in the research as reducing polarisation, but what leads users to expose themselves to such cross-cutting media? Jihye suggests that media trust is critical to such media selection choices.