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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 final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

People using social media data come from a very wide range of disciplines and bring diverse perspectives to the research; in addition to creating quite a bit of confusion, this can also support the creation of new approaches and epistemologies, and will benefit from a pragmatic and even pragmaticist approach to …

The final speaker in this session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the fabulous Annett Heft, whose focus is on patterns and dynamics of conspiracy theories (as part of the Neovex project), and especially on how these spread from the fringes to more mainstream visibility, not least also via social media.

Every digital platform shapes the dissemination of conspiracy theories in different ways, depending on its specific communicative affordances, and of course these platforms are also interconnected and integrated into a multi-platform communicative environment. How do the linguistic styles of conspiracist communication differ across platforms, then, and how …

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 …

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

Public communication flows online are now a dynamic network, which is difficult to model …

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 next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Ethan Busby, zooming in from Utah. His focus is especially on the use of Large Language Models in research, and current research focusses especially on the analysis of conversations in social media spaces, and the potential for automated tools to interact with such conversations.

Large Language Models have the potential to scale up such research and interventions, both in real-world and in simulated contexts. He introduces the concept of ‘silicon sampling’, which asks AI systems to assume a particular political persona in order to then simulate engagement in or …