Polarisation

It’s the second and last day of the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference in Berlin, and it starts with a panel on polarisation that I’ve had a hand in organising. We begin with Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on discursive polarisation. He begins by pointing out that polarisation is often ill-defined, and the communicative dimension in particular is often under-conceptualised and under-researched.

The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

The second speaker in this panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Christine Meltzer, whose focus is on the perception of social cohesion in society, and its relationship with media use. Such cohesion is critical as it plays a crucial role in societies’ responses to crises.

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information.

The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation.

Continuing with the round-up of recent activity I began in my last few posts (covering new articles, new conference presentations, new research videos, and my lecture series on Gatewatching and News Curation), here’s an update on a few other writings and presentations for a more general audience.

Facebook News Ban Redux

Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In Australia, the NMBC resulted in Facebook blocking Australian users from accessing or posting any news on its platform for over a week, before a compromise that strongly favoured Facebook was found – and as I write this, the same is happening in Canada. I spoke to Michael about Australia’s long and tortured path towards and through the news ban, and shared our findings on what happened on Facebook during the Australian news ban (in short: live continued as usual, proving Facebook’s point that news matters a lot less to the platform than policy-makers might have thought):

Social Media Campaigning on the Voice Referendum

In other current events, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I have also begun to track the social media campaigns surrounding Australia’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which will be held in the final quarter of 2023. We’re still at an early stage of the campaign, of course, but already the PoliDashboard project (which our colleagues at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University have kindly extended to cover Australia) is picking up on the intensified advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and so is our Australian Ad Observatory operated by the Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Together with my colleague Dan Angus, I published an overview of our observations to date in The Guardian recently; subsequently, I also appeared on the Centre for Responsible Technology’s Burning Platforms podcast:

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.

My presentation was up next at IAMCR 2023, and outlines the overall agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are the slides: