Elections

And the final speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on coding Italian news data using Large Language Models. This worked with some 85,000 news articles shared on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections, and first classified such URLs as political or non-political; it then produced and clustered text embeddings for these articles, and used GPT-4-turbo to classify the dominant topics in these clusters.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation.

The next presentation in this AoIR 2024 conference session is by Constantin Paschertz and Christian Schneider, whose focus is on populist German politics on TikTok in the Bavarian state election in 2023. The use of social media in political campaigning is not new, of course, but German parties have tended to be hesitant to use TikTok for this – out of concerns about the Chinese ownership and dubious data practices of the platform.

The second speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Sally-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in the intersection between platforms and politics. There have now been several years of critical discussion around this troubled intersection, and a growing legitimacy crisis four such platforms. Much of this is related to electoral politics, especially as platforms are now widely used to talk about election – and to intervene in electoral politics in legitimate and illegitimate ways.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the brilliant Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the fundamental changes to the abortion debate in the United States since the current Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling. Abortion has been a highly polarising issue in the US ever since women’s reproductive rights fell under legal jurisdiction in the 1800s, of course, and is tangled up with American nation-building mythologies.

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference panel is my QUT colleague Daniel Whelan-Shamy, with whom I’ll present our paper on polarisation on Indigenous debates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In both countries there is a long and complex history of colonial oppression towards their respective Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum sought to remedy this through the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, while in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed as early as 1840 and gradually led to greater recognition and rights for Māori groups. Our work examines the patterns of potentially destructive polarisation in these debates, and our presentation slides are below:

The next session at the AoIR 2024 conference conference is a session that I co-organised which focusses on controversies, and starts with a presentation by Felipe Soares. His focus is on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, which finally brought the reign of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to an end.

The next session at ECREA 2024 that I’m attending is on communication in times of illiberalism, and starts with Natalie-Anne Hall. Her focus is on political engagement around Brexit on Facebook, in the post-referendum period between 2017 and 2019. Rather than gathering Facebook content, this study focussed on Facebook users – in recognition of the fact that Facebook remains the leading mainstream social network in the UK.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Nuri Sadida, whose focus is on the impact of ‘fake news’ and media literacy on affective polarisation in Indonesia. Such affective polarisation has increased in Indonesia over the past ten years, especially in the context of elections; derogatory nicknames for out-groups, such as ‘tadpole’ or ‘desert lizard’, are common especially in social media conversations.