The third presenter in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose focus is on cross-cutting exposure to news content in the Danish context. This research is being done in the context of increasing polarisation, even in Denmark, which implies that hearing voices from opposite sides matters for ensuring that people form better-informed worldviews.

When encountering social media posts that one disagrees with, there are various opportunities for engagement; broader media use is likely to result in greater cross-cutting exposure, but such cross-cutting exposure itself does not necessarily lead to …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose interest is in cross-cutting engagement and polarisation. This is often connected to people sorting into homogeneous information environments (or ‘echo chambers’), yet cross-cutting exposure is actually very common in everyday experience, and such exposure can itself also be a source of polarisation.

Passive and active cross-cutting engagement and polarisation turn out to be more complex matters than simple ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ narratives tend to suggest, not least also because such cross-cutting exposure can also occur in …

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.

The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, presenting a study of pro-Bolsonaro narratives on Facebook in Brazil. The key question here is whether online hyperpartisan groups are as stable as they are thought to be; is that true, and how does such stability fare in times of intense political crisis?

Brazil is an obvious case for the study of such questions. The project tracked some 59 pro-Bolsonaro accounts between 2021 and 2023, a timeframe including Bolsonaro’s election loss against Lula and his subsequent coup attempt. The dataset contains some 12 million …