Polarisation

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this …

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Eckehard Olbrich, whose focus is on the evidence for polarisation in the German Twittersphere. This seeks to evaluate the claims about the role of social media as a driver of polarisation, and to address the negative impacts of such polarisation if such polarisation is indeed present. Polarisation might exist at issue, ideological, or affective levels, and these levels also intersect with each other, of course.

Taking the German Twitter data as a starting point, then, what are the issues that are being discussed, and what evidence for polarisation is …

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

This was true to some degree, and social media did become a discursive engine of our political public sphere – yet the discourse there wasn’t particularly cross-cutting or inclusive …

The final speaker on this first day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Luca Rossi, presenting some of the outcomes of the PolarVis project to map online debate around climate change from a visual perspective.

The project is interested in the visual content that these groups share online, and in how this content is used to support their narratives. Visual elements have been especially important in climate change debates, both because of the emotional impact of metonymic depictions of climate change and the use of scientific visualisations to describe and forecast climate change and its implications …

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

What circulates here might be misinformation (claims that counter the currently available evidence, intentionally or not); selective information choices; and purposeful, fabricated disinformation. Typical disinformation campaigns might place deceptive information in an otherwise …

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Cornelius Puschmann, presenting work from the excellent POLTRACK project on polarisation and individualised online information environments, which has been conducting a longitudinal panel study as well as tracking participants’ online activities in Germany over a period of 20 months since March 2023.

This presentation focusses especially on participants’ search practices, with search of course representing a key pathway to political information. This project focussed especially on searches for information on German political actors, and was especially interested in the role of affect towards those actors, and of …

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with a presentation by Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on polarised debates around climate protests by groups like Letzte Generation or Extinction Rebellion. Such debates do not take place in a vacuum, however, but are informed and framed by media reporting. Is such reporting polarising these debates? What might this polarisation lead to?

There is a communicative side to polarisation processes, then – this can be understood as discursive polarisation: the divergence of a sphere of consensus into multiple such spheres that represent a disrupted public sphere. This might …

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule. The implied social contract here was to provide increased prosperity for the people as long as they did not become politically active.

The Russian opposition under Alexey Navalny managed to cut through this stasis by producing popular and engaging content and …

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Rita Marchetti, who shifts our attention to another scandal: the Qatargate case. She notes the limited attention of media scholars to corruption issues, even in spite of growing funding for anticorruption studies of legacy media – the potential role of social media in anticorruption activism has received very limited attention, in particular. There is more interest from economics than media scholars in this, it seems.

Italy has long been perceived as suffering from corruption, and this is frustrating citizens and politicians – but recent corruption indices do document that corruption remains …