Polarisation

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Nadezhda Ozornina, whose focus is on the use of humorous Internet memes in fighting the climate crisis. Climate change has a comparatively low news value overall, outside of concrete crises, and humour has the potential to break through where news reporting itself does not; how are memes deployed in climate discourse, then?

There is no unified definition of Internet memes, but broadly they contain text, image, and/or video content that reproduce pop-cultural references and require contextual knowledge for a full understanding. Humour has always been present …

I’m a little late to the post-lunch session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, which has started with Ana Margarida Barreto’s paper on discussions of climate change on eleven Portuguese parties’ Facebook pages. They investigated the presence of various climate change-related topics on those pages.

Two broadly green parties talked about climate change considerably more than any of the others; though during the election all other parties also talk somewhat more about climate change. Most parties share a substantial number of images and videos, though the far-right populist Chega party exclusively shared links and no audiovisual content.

Minor and …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Amrat Haq, whose focus is on polarisation amongst young people in Pakistan. Pakistani politics has long been populist in nature, and dominated by two broad political groups; however, a third party emerged in the 2010s in the form of Imran Khan’s highly personality-base party, and particularly courted younger voter groups – not least also through its use of social media.

This use of social media by Khan’s party was notable especially in the 2018 election; by the 2024 election the other parties had also caught up …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Harry Li, whose interest is in affective polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States. Such affective polarisation describes in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but past research has mainly examined how this plays out in two- or multi-party political systems, rather than towards broader issues and themes.

In China, while there is a one-party system that does not allow for partisan polarisation, polarisation around specific issues and topics may nonetheless exist; here we might regard friendly or allied countries as part of the in-group, and …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in polarisation in hybrid media systems. She notes the specificity of polarisation patterns to specific media and political systems; observations from the US do not translate easily to other countries, for example. How might polarisation unfold in as tightly controlled a media system as China’s, for instance?

Discursive power in China is distributed across state-owned mainstream media, other commercial media, individual influencers on social media, and ordinary users on social media platforms. Such platforms include Weibo, WeChat, and leading Q&A platform …

My second day at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts with a session on polarisation and media effects, which begins with a paper by Rachel Neo and Benjamin Johnson, whose focus is on affective polarisation on Reddit in the US. The US is now deeply polarised, and this also expresses in incivility from both sides of politics. Such incivility is visible in disrespectful exchanges between partisans, which is often expressed affectively.

This is a case of affective polarisation: positive feelings towards the in-group, and negative feelings towards the out-group. Reddit is one space online where this can be seen …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jinzhuo Liu, whose focus is on affective polarisation in online discussions about Chinese traditional medicine. Is this reduced by shared national identity? The mechanism to explain such a tendency would be the Common In-group Identity Model.

Affective polarisation between opinion-based groups results in the formation or identification of in- and out-groups, treating each other in hostile ways. This is often also observed in online engagement between such groups. Such groups nonetheless foster cross-cutting discussions online; such exposure to opposing views may only increase polarisation between them …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my great QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting progress findings from a large literature review on populism. We have previously observed how poorly defined the concept of polarisation is in the literature; there are many forms of polarisation that scholars have identified, but hardly and overarching perspectives.

This project took a similar approach to the concept of populism, which turns out to be better defined; dominant in this is Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin ideology that highlights divisions between ‘us’ …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

For the last session on this opening day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m at a session on populism and propaganda, and we start with Karl Mendoza. He highlights the importance of trust, and the way that trust can fracture at times of scandal. When trust breaks down in a democracy, what exactly is if that people stop believing in – democracy itself, the system, its actors?

Scandals are often seen as breaches of ethics or governance, but they also activate competing moral grammars: in deeply divided democracies, trust does not simply divide – it polarises. Trust is …