Politics

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Gholam Khiabany, who points especially at the absence of significant debates about war and military intervention in political communication. War is not absent from media research, of course, but perhaps war should be considered as central in our reassessment of democracy itself.

The post-lunch session at ECREA 2018 is on media, democracy, and social change, and starts with Des Freedman. He begins by noting the role of the state as a particular, and particularly important, institutional power in political communication, whose role tends to be underresearched compared to that of various non-state actors from politicians to activists – perhaps because the idea of the state is seen as somewhat dated, following the decline in authority of territorial nation states.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose focus is on polarisation in Twitter-based discussions of inter-ethnic conflicts in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. She also notes that the debate about whether echo chambers and filter bubbles are real is still ongoing, and that attitudes towards political actors have been most researched to date; divergence in such attitudes is often interpreted as polarisation, but this often mistakes the formation of homophilous clusters for actual polarisation. Importantly, too, cluster formation is often non-binary, and instead leads to the development of multiple, overlapping, and dynamic thematic clusters.

The next speaker in this session at ECREA 2018 is Anne-Marie in der Au, who notes evidence that individual selection of media content may foster polarisation; however, there is also suspicion that algorithmic selection may foster such polarisation by building on and reinforcing such selective exposure. But empirical evidence on this is divided; several studies show no algorithmic impact or even demonstrate a negative correlation. What is going on here, and are there other variables that may interfere?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Jasmin Kadel, who presents a comparative study of polarisation across Switzerland and Germany. Polarisation can be understood along factual (across issues), perceived (misjudgments about polarisation in society), and affective dimensions (appreciation of co-partisan others); the study examined such polarisation amongst adult newspaper readers in both countries.

The first session on this first full day at ECREA 2018 is on polarisation, and starts with Melanie Magin. She begins by highlighting the potential deleterious effects of polarisation on society: societies need a common meeting ground, and this has traditionally been provided by the news media and their agenda-setting function. But the diversification of information sources and channels may contribute to fragmenting this, and the algorithmic selection of content in these channels could aid this fragmentation – yet there is very little empirical evidence for the existence of the echo chambers or filter bubbles this is said to cause.

The second keynote speaker in this opening evening at ECREA 2018 is Lina Dencik, whose keynote at last weekend’s iCS Symposium I covered a few days ago; here, her focus is on resistance in the datafied society. Such resistance is important in the present moment, and scholars have an increasingly important and more and more politicised role in this context.

There has been an overall, ongoing shift towards data-driven governance in recent years, leading to the emergence of a genuinely – but far from universally beneficially – datafied society. We have already seen a long history of digital surveillance, exemplified not least in the Snowden leaks, and this is represented in policy, news coverage, and general public understanding. This complicates our positioning as digital citizens and colours our understanding of the datafied society; it has revealed big data and surveillance capitalism as a form of governance, and normalised data collection and surveillance culture in our everyday lives.

The final speaker at this iCS Symposium is Yiping Xia, who returns our focus to the Russian-operated Internet Research Agency troll farm. One of their most successful accounts was @Jenn_Abrams, active across multiple platforms (Wordpress, Medium, Telegram, Gab) and followed by some 70,000 accounts on Twitter.

The next speaker in this iCS Symposium is Michael Bossetta, who focusses on the specific problems of spearphishing, disinformation, and bot activity on social media platforms. Could these problems be investigated by researchers conducting a controlled, simulated cyberattack themselves?