Polarisation

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 …

The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.

Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take …

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.

I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.

Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in …

And the final speakers at the Bots Building Bridges workshop project are Mathias Orlikowski and Tony Veale, who begin by noting that bots can have a positive impact on online discussion by facilitating an increase in viewpoint diversity. Such bots might emphasise rational debate, but could also introduce more humorous perspectives.

One example of a polarised debate in Germany is the ongoing discussion about the introduction of a stricter speed limit on German freeways; in online discussions about this, a discussion bot could intervene by presenting an opposite point of view. Some such arguments could be pre-written responses to well-known …

The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.

Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.