Finally, we end this ECREA 2024 session with a video presentation by Kilian Bühling, whose focus is on the use of Telegram for German-language COVID-19 protest mobilisation. This covers some 715 broadcast channels and 229 public group chats. Telegram has a 10% audience reach in Germany, and is used especially by contentious social movements for both public and private communication. The perceived anonymity and lack of content moderation here are especially attractive to such groups – including the Querdenker movement which opposed public health measures to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.

This movement was established in spring 2020, and engaged in …

The final speaker in this final Social Media & Society 2024 session is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor Farfan, whose interest is in the use of semiotics in combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the study of polarisation. NLP comes with a very diverse range of applications, variously examining superficial and structural aspects at differing levels of complexity.

Kate’s work is interested centrally in the structure of texts, and dependency parsing is a useful tool for this – but such analytical frameworks also substantially complicate the analysis: dependency parsing can show up some 40 or more relationships between words …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.

Similarly, there is plenty of evidence of spatial polarisation in the United States, where certain states and counties are regarded as dominated by Republicans or Democrats; this points to a spatial sorting and geographic clustering of political partisans. How might we connect such individual-level homophily and place-level …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

Elite and mass polarisation have similar dynamics, and may be related to each other; mass polarisation is often measured on a simple left-right political scale, but in multiparty systems can be better assessed within a cognitive political network framework, where respondents assess the interrelationships between the various parties and thereby produce …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jeeyun Sophia Baik, whose interest is in the long-standing allegations of anti-conservative bias that have been made against social media platforms. Such claims have been embraced prominently by Donald Trump and other far-right actors, in particular, and some US politicians have even attempted to ban what they understand as ‘social media censorship’.

The problem is that claims of anti-conservative bias have been proven to be unfounded by a range of studies, and that there is in fact a substantial platforming of conservative and far-right voices by social media …