Polarisation

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Laura Teruel Rodríguez, with a paper on the intersection of polarisation and disinformation. Disinformation (and other forms of information disorder) has played a considerable part in driving polarisation, especially in contexts such as the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump as US President; the project is interested, therefore, in the correlations between polarisation and disinformation in the European quality press since 2017.

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else.

The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Trisha Lin, whose focus is on health misinformation in the context of COVID-19. Such misinformation is damaging and highly politicised, and the present study examines this for the context of Taiwan’s polarised political system. The present study conducted a quantitative survey to examine the interplay between misinformation, polarisation, media literacy, and vaccination acceptance in Taiwan, therefore.

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.