Polarisation

The final speaker in this final session at IAMCR 2024 is, appropriately enough, outgoing IAMCR President Nico Carpentier, whose interest is in expert imaginings of the future of conflict and communication technologies. He begins by outlining the patterns of conflict in a very broad sense. Such conflict can be agonistic or antagonistic, and towards the antagonistic side there may be increasingly violent grey zone conflicts, armed conflicts, or hybrid conflicts – and the latter then also move beyond the realm of democratically acceptable conflicts.

Media play a critical role in all such conflicts, of course; media and communication technologies are …

The final IAMCR 2024 session for today is in disinformation and polarisation, and starts with Ivan Paganotti’s presentation on institutional communication by the leading candidates’ campaign Websites in the 2022 Brazilian election. In particular, he is interested in whether and how they tried to respond to electoral disinformation, and whether they had policies to curtail such disinformation once in office.

Data collection focussed especially on the period between the first and second rounds of the election, and examined any attempts at fact-checking electoral disinformation as well as responses to the federal administration’s social media guidelines.

The Lula and PT campaign episodically attempted to contest every new piece of what it considered to be false information, and also structurally debated the overall impact of disinformation on the political process. But its own efforts to promote ‘fact-checks’ of false information largely focussed on amplifying the responses from partisan trade unions and other organisations that were close to its own political interests.

The Bolsonaro and PL campaign avoided any discussion of disinformation; the term did not appear on the PL Website, and Bolsonaro himself did not have a Website of his own (only social media accounts). Bolsonaro only generally complained about being the victim of various ‘lies’ by his opponents, deflecting criticism directed at him and questioning the very existence of ‘fake news’ as a meaningful category.

Neither of these two strategies are especially productive; neither make a meaningful contribution to the fight against mis- and disinformation. They also do not align with the federal guidelines against disinformation published by the previous Rousseff and Bolsonaro administrations.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting our work on the discussions of the 2022 Qatar World Cup by online football communities (slides are below). This draws on the theory of third spaces: primarily apolitical spaces where political talk can emerge and often takes place in a more congenial, respectful manner. This means they have democratic potential: discussion there may be able to avoid political disagreement and the avoidance of political talk.

We apply this concept to the case of the Qatar World Cup, which was highly controversial for the Qatari …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Kenton Wilkinson, whose interest is the presence of biracial couples and mixed-race families in US television advertising. Such diversity is becoming a new flashpoint in current culture wars in the country.

There is a long history of such culture wars in the US, but they have ramped up much further in recent years. In Texas, where Kenton is based, this has been especially pronounced, not least also in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic; the current Texas governor Greg Abbott has been at the forefront of implementing a number of especially …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nazira Bairbek, whose focus is on the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Kazakhstan; some Russian users in Kazakhstan responded to the invasion by asking Putin to annex Kazakhstan as well, for instance, while many Kazakh people took the side of Ukraine and feared Russian aggression against their own country.

This reflects the complicated post-colonial nature of many post-Soviet nations; they have fought for their independence from Russian influence since 1991, but maintain close relationships with Russia, and some people in these countries believe that they cannot survive without …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Caixie Tu, whose interest is in Hong Kong residents’ discussions about government ordinances on social media. The key question here is who speaks out on social media, and for what reasons.

Users’ cognitive responses can mediate such processes; this may include news attention, news knowledge, information elaboration, and other aspects, and engagement with heterogeneous information sources may be especially important. Individuals’ issue involvement, which may be value-relevant or outcome-relevant, may also affect their level of engagement in such debates.

How do the two types of issue involvement mediate the influence of …

The next session at IAMCR 2024 starts with Svetlana Bodrunova, who introduces a methodological focus in the study of topic evolution in user talk on social media platforms. Key to this is the use of artificial intelligence tools.

Deliberative public communication research tends to remain strongly influenced by Habermasian normativity, but this is not necessarily very productive. It ignores the right of participants not to be deliberative, and therefore fails to fully understand the phenomenon of dissonant public spheres, or the cumulative nature of public discussion. We need to better understand how opinions accumulate online.

Big data approaches are central …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Liu Youmeng, whose interest is also in the impact of social media on affective polarisation in the Chinese public sphere. Indeed, high-choice media environments may generally increase affective polarisation, and selective exposure to pro-attitudinal content may have a significant role to play here. Individuals’ perceptions about the underlying opinion climate may also affect this, however.

The project examined this through a representative nationwide survey of some 1,300 participants in China, assessing affective polarisation through a feeling thermometer and pro- and counter-attitudinal content exposure through self-reporting.

The results show that counter-attitudinal …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in the impact of social media affordances on polarisation. This addresses the lack of cross-platform studies on polarisation in platforms, as well as the lack of work on non-western political contexts; the project therefore examines five controversial debates on three Chinese social media platforms.

Polarisation mechanisms include inclusiveness (involving all affected individuals), justification (through sufficient arguments and reasoning), and responsiveness (exposure to heterogeneous viewpoints), while platform affordances like entry barriers, content capacity, social networks, and interactional feedback in turn affect the presence and impact of …

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

This recognises that reality is not black and white, but that individuals may have different levels of affiliation towards a variety of political parties or positions; it measures the individual’s level of affiliation towards both poles of several possible scales of affiliation. These can then be …