The next presentation in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is by Laura Jacobs, who begins by outlining the function of political in- and out-group identification and its links to polarisation and conflict in society. Political parties make use of in- and out-group appeals in their messaging, and may also draw on populism in constructing ‘us vs. them’ oppositions.
Populism is a thin-centred ideology that positions the ‘pure’ people against the ‘corrupt’ elites; it might connect with a host ideology (e.g. socialism on the left or nativism on the right). This project, then, explores how left- and right-wing parties …
I got to the next session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference a little late, so I missed Christina Monzer’s presentation – I’ll start instead with Willem Buyens. His interest is in news on social media: social media remain a critical space of news consumption and engagement, and the dissemination of news here is also governed by the social media logics that affect news curation here.
Political actors also act as news curators on social media, and in doing so make specific news selection decisions; how audiences engage with the news shared by political actors then also depends on their …
I am presenting the next paper in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference, providing a brief overview of our Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of polarisation and partisanship. Here are the slides:
The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Luna Staes, whose focus is also on online user engagement with street protests. Social movement organisations are using social media to engage with the public, and this also generates user engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.) that provide instant feedback on online publics’ appetite for protest messages.
But to what extent do protest messages actually resonate, and what explains such user engagement: is this related to the features of the actual protest, of the content about the protest, or of the digital communication style itself? The present study examined …
The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.
Do such perceptions of misinformation levels vary across countries, then, or across platforms? Does news interest or previous knowledge affect such perceptions? The present project surveyed people across 17 European countries and the US, and asked about perceptions for a range of social media platforms, messaging apps, conventional media, and alternative …
Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.
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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …
The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).
This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …
Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In …
