Polarisation

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is especially on the use of LLMs in stance detection in news content. A stance is a public act by a social actors, achieved dialogically through communication, which evaluates objects, positions the self and other subjects, and aligns with other subjects within a sociocultural field.

Here, the focus is broadly on stances towards issues, persons, groups, and organisations. There are some tools for doing so, but they mainly focus on English-language content, are designed for specific types of data, and tend …

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference that I’m in is on historicising the far right, which clearly is a much-needed activity under current circumstances. We start with Kevan Feshami, whose interest is in white nationalism. White nationalist groups are themselves engaged in producing a narrative of their own history, in order to then be able to encourage their followers to be, or become, what they think their historical identity ought to be.

This project itself goes back hundreds of years. White nationalism is defined by a belief in a unifying racial identity; a perceived connection to land and …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation. Such breakdown might manifest as an absence of communication between opposing sides, and this is difficult to identify empirically if all we have is trace data about active communication processes.

This project focusses on comments, ‘love’ and ‘angry’ reactions, and shares on Facebook as indicators of affective polarisation on …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the brilliant Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the fundamental changes to the abortion debate in the United States since the current Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling. Abortion has been a highly polarising issue in the US ever since women’s reproductive rights fell under legal jurisdiction in the 1800s, of course, and is tangled up with American nation-building mythologies.

Ever since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, there has been a consistent effort to push back against its consequences, especially from the conservative right; this is …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Alia Azmi, whose focus is on the campaign to address sexual violence in Indonesia. For various sociocultural reasons, Indonesia did not engage much with the global #metoo movement; the defamation laws and victim blaming practices have generally deterred victim-survivors to speak out against sexual violence. Indonesia also did not have any strong laws against sexual violence.

A new bill addressing sexual violence was proposed in 2016, and remained stuck in parliamentary processes for several years; clauses about inability to give consent in particular were interpreted by conservative …

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference panel is my QUT colleague Daniel Whelan-Shamy, with whom I’ll present our paper on polarisation on Indigenous debates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In both countries there is a long and complex history of colonial oppression towards their respective Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum sought to remedy this through the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, while in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed as early as 1840 and gradually led to greater recognition and rights for Māori groups. Our work examines the patterns of potentially …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Laura Iannelli, whose focus is on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Italy was amongst the first countries in the world to implement a mass lockdown, and this became an arena for polarised conflict amongst political elites. The question here is whether this also fostered societal and individual polarisation, and what role mis- and disinformation played in this process.

Elite polarisation can lead mass polarisation, although crises can also produce a ‘rally around the flag’ phenomenon that reduces polarisation. This offers two contrasting scenarios, of more …

The next session at the AoIR 2024 conference conference is a session that I co-organised which focusses on controversies, and starts with a presentation by Felipe Soares. His focus is on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, which finally brought the reign of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to an end. The election was beset by the dissemination of disinformation on social media, especially about the integrity of the electoral process, and this also led to calls for military intervention in the political system, and coup attempt by Bolsonaro supporters in Brasilia on 8 January 2022.

What is difficult here is that …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Luigi Arminio, whose interest is in the sociolinguistic patterns of polarisation on climate change on Facebook (this approach carries on from the previous presentation). Such patterns may also represent socioeconomic differences: people with lower socioeconomic status tend to be more open to climate change-denialist rhetoric, and such groups also differ from others in their overall communication styles. Can such differences be identified in climate discourse, marking the proponents and opponents of climate activism? Do they influence audience responses?

The project compiled some 10,000 posts from 250 public pro- and anti-climate …