Social Media

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Shuo Li, whose interest is in the framing of cyberviolence on social media in China. Such cyberviolence has been on the rise on platforms like Weibo, and is disproportionately directed at women and vulnerable groups; it includes insults, defamation, rumours, and privacy violations.

How do Weibo users themselves frame such phenomena? Are there differences between ordinary and influential accounts, and between posts with high and low interactivity? Do group polarisation and discursive power play a role?

This study works with some 161,000 Weibo posts containing the …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Amrat Haq, whose focus is on polarisation amongst young people in Pakistan. Pakistani politics has long been populist in nature, and dominated by two broad political groups; however, a third party emerged in the 2010s in the form of Imran Khan’s highly personality-base party, and particularly courted younger voter groups – not least also through its use of social media.

This use of social media by Khan’s party was notable especially in the 2018 election; by the 2024 election the other parties had also caught up …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Harry Li, whose interest is in affective polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States. Such affective polarisation describes in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but past research has mainly examined how this plays out in two- or multi-party political systems, rather than towards broader issues and themes.

In China, while there is a one-party system that does not allow for partisan polarisation, polarisation around specific issues and topics may nonetheless exist; here we might regard friendly or allied countries as part of the in-group, and …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in polarisation in hybrid media systems. She notes the specificity of polarisation patterns to specific media and political systems; observations from the US do not translate easily to other countries, for example. How might polarisation unfold in as tightly controlled a media system as China’s, for instance?

Discursive power in China is distributed across state-owned mainstream media, other commercial media, individual influencers on social media, and ordinary users on social media platforms. Such platforms include Weibo, WeChat, and leading Q&A platform …

My second day at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts with a session on polarisation and media effects, which begins with a paper by Rachel Neo and Benjamin Johnson, whose focus is on affective polarisation on Reddit in the US. The US is now deeply polarised, and this also expresses in incivility from both sides of politics. Such incivility is visible in disrespectful exchanges between partisans, which is often expressed affectively.

This is a case of affective polarisation: positive feelings towards the in-group, and negative feelings towards the out-group. Reddit is one space online where this can be seen …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jinzhuo Liu, whose focus is on affective polarisation in online discussions about Chinese traditional medicine. Is this reduced by shared national identity? The mechanism to explain such a tendency would be the Common In-group Identity Model.

Affective polarisation between opinion-based groups results in the formation or identification of in- and out-groups, treating each other in hostile ways. This is often also observed in online engagement between such groups. Such groups nonetheless foster cross-cutting discussions online; such exposure to opposing views may only increase polarisation between them …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.

Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Tanmay Samanta, whose focus is on digital greenwashing. Social media, and especially influencers on social media platforms, are critical to promoting sustainable consumerism; influencer marketing is also a key element of greenwashing, however.

Their style of storytelling is central to their success, and considerable effort goes into this. Greenwashing, in particular, purposefully creates false, favourable opinions about a product, service, or company’s efforts to be environmentally friendly. Tanmay explored this especially for social media influencers in India, examining their influence, their use of sustainability or greenwashing …

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.