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And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is by Pengfei Zhao, who is interested in the balance between retributive and restorative reactions to toxic online comments. This is likely also to be influenced by participants awareness of the existence of a broader group of community onlookers who follow exchanges between offenders and those who object to their offences.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Chas Monge, who is interested how third parties make sense of online incivility, and is using the path model of blame: is there a norm violation; did an agent cause it; was this intentional; are there justified reasons for this or could it have been prevented; and on the basis of all this, what level of blame should be attributed to them?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Seo Yoon Lee, whose interest is in toxic communicative behaviours, and especially counter-normative opinion expression in online communities. Such community dissidents are often understood as online trolls seeking to introduce community chaos, but this behaviour can be seen as both toxic or constructive: it is toxic if it is done simply to disrupt and aggravate, but constructive if it genuinely seeks to highlight alternative views.

The next ICA 2024 conference session is on incivility in digital environments, and starts with Stephanie Bührer, presenting a scoping review on digital hate. This includes any kind of digitally disseminated hostile content directed against individuals or collectives, and includes forms such as cyberbullying, online incivility, online hate speech, trolling, harassment, and other phenomena.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Baoning Gong, whose interest is in the social media activities of the German far right across a range of platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Gettr. This cross-platform focus is important because they all form part of a far-right online ecosystem, but single-platform studies still dominant the research literature. Far-right actors are well-known for moving between platforms if their accounts are banned from any one platform.

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.

I skipped the morning session this Saturday at the ICA 2024 conference as I was doing a live interview with Australian breakfast television about the current, ill-defined Parliamentary Inquiry into social media; more on that another time. So, I’m starting with a session on mis- and disinformation which begins with Sabina Mihelj, who has just published an open-access book on The Illiberal Public Sphere.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.