The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose focus is on perceived polarisation in the United States. Such perceived polarisation refers to perceptions of other political groups’ positioning in comparison to one’s own, and may be moderated by political communication across political boundaries.

Patterns may further depend on the specific issues being discussed, and the focus of this paper is especially on foreign policy debates in the US, which may or may not be less politicised – at the moment, for instance, Democrats and Republicans are drifting apart in their attitudes about military aid to …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Isabella Glogger, whose interest is in reinforcing relationships between political identities and alternative news consumption. The focus here is especially on Sweden, where alternative media use has been on the rise especially on the right wing of politics, and has been connected with more pessimistic viewpoints on a variety of societal issues, especially also on climate change. Selective exposure tendencies have also been observed here, potentially generating more societal polarisation.

This is captured in the Reinforcing Spiral Model, which assumes that media effects and selective exposure are interconnected processes that …

It’s Friday morning and I’m in a casino on the Gold Coast of Queensland, so this must be the start of the ICA 2024 conference. I’m in a session on polarisation, and we start with a paper by Minchul Kim on the prediction of partisan media exposure through attitudes towards news brands. The interest here is in the United States, where the assumption is that partisan exposure might result in widely diverging worldviews.

Conventional approaches expect partisans to see certain news brands as ideologically aligned or counter to their own views, and to choose to engage or avoid news brands …

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this …

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Eckehard Olbrich, whose focus is on the evidence for polarisation in the German Twittersphere. This seeks to evaluate the claims about the role of social media as a driver of polarisation, and to address the negative impacts of such polarisation if such polarisation is indeed present. Polarisation might exist at issue, ideological, or affective levels, and these levels also intersect with each other, of course.

Taking the German Twitter data as a starting point, then, what are the issues that are being discussed, and what evidence for polarisation is …

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

This was true to some degree, and social media did become a discursive engine of our political public sphere – yet the discourse there wasn’t particularly cross-cutting or inclusive …

The final speaker on this first day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Luca Rossi, presenting some of the outcomes of the PolarVis project to map online debate around climate change from a visual perspective.

The project is interested in the visual content that these groups share online, and in how this content is used to support their narratives. Visual elements have been especially important in climate change debates, both because of the emotional impact of metonymic depictions of climate change and the use of scientific visualisations to describe and forecast climate change and its implications …

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

What circulates here might be misinformation (claims that counter the currently available evidence, intentionally or not); selective information choices; and purposeful, fabricated disinformation. Typical disinformation campaigns might place deceptive information in an otherwise …