Polarisation

The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance. Such (intentional or unintentional) avoidance as well as use of alternative media is seen as problematic as it reduces people’s ability to participate fully in public debate, and should also be seen as a political act.

There are many definitions of alternative media; some …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Trisha Lin, whose focus is on health misinformation in the context of COVID-19. Such misinformation is damaging and highly politicised, and the present study examines this for the context of Taiwan’s polarised political system. The present study conducted a quantitative survey to examine the interplay between misinformation, polarisation, media literacy, and vaccination acceptance in Taiwan, therefore.

In principle, Taiwan responded well to the COVID-19 crisis, but had a major lockdown in May to August 2021 and suffered from considerable foreign cyberattacks during this time; vaccination take-up was also somewhat slow, and …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.

Time and dynamics are dimensions with their own logics here, and lead to a divergence of discourses within online talk. What emerges here (and Svetlana …