Polarisation

The fourth speaker in this session the AANZCA 2025 conference is Milica Stilinovic, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories, and especially on how people are drawn from more mundane spaces into far-right conspiracist ideation. This is often described as falling down the rabbit-hole, but the linear descent into alternative thinking that this image describes is not an accurate description of contemporary dynamics. Instead, there are any number of conspiracy theories available for users to explore, from which they may pick and choose their own worldviews.

This may involve drawing a demarcation line between those theories that users are willing …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is again my QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, this time presenting our research into how generative AI chatbots respond to queries about conspiracy theories. We have already seen how engagement with such chatbots can create harm, and it is important to examine what safety guardrails are in place to prevent chatbots from supporting conspiracy theories.

We examined this by assuming the persona of a casually curious chatbot user, asking a series of questions related to various such conspiracy theories. These include historical stories such as the assassination of John F …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Byron Clark, who continues the focus on conspiracy theories with a particular focus on New Zealand. His interest is in discourses of climate change on Reality Check Radio, a station operated by the group Voices for Freedom, which takes an explicitly anti-mainstream perspective.

The station appears to ‘common sense’ and ‘normalcy’, in the process superseding rational discourse and bypassing factual information; instead, it pushes climate change disinformation by engaging in norm-setting and norm-entrenchment that seeks to define key actor groups such as ‘the community’, ‘the media’, ‘politicians’, and …

The final (!) session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on conspiracy theories, and starts with my great QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, presenting her work on the conspiratorial canon. Her focus on the knowledge production processes of conspiracy theorists, and ‘conspiracy theory’ here means an effort to explain events or practices by references to the supposed machinations of powerful people who work to conceal their role. Most people in the Anglosphere have been found to believe in at least one conspiracy theory.

How do conspiracy theorists create knowledge, then? There is a link here to concepts such as participatory disinformation …

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Brigid O’Connell, whose focus is on the emergence of the newspaper The Light as a problematic alternative news source. It can be described as dark political communication: political content that seeks to deepen political polarisation and discontent.

The Light’s coverage centres on COVID-19 denialism and conspiracist perspectives; it publishes in print and online, and originated in the UK and Ireland before adding an Australian edition soon after, funded by a coalition of COVID-19 sceptics and others. The publication describes itself as a ‘truthpaper’, and in this aligns …

The third presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ciaran Ryan, whose focus is on the populist 2022 Convoy to Canberra, which promoted anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its themes included moralised delegitimisation and affective responses.

This can be described as promoting destructive polarisation on COVID-19 themes: it dehumanised, demeaned, and insulted its opponents. Opponents were seen as existential threats, using hypermoralised language that positioned the contest as a battle between good and evil. This also means that legitimate concerns are ignored, and even in-group members who seek some degree of engagement and consensus …

The second paper in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by my QUT colleague Klaus Gröbner, whose focus is on transnational similarities between far-right news outlets. The far right has increasingly connected at a transnational level in recent years even in spite of its largely nationalist orientation; CPAC and the network of ‘patriot’ parties in Europe are both vehicles for this, and this has also led to a coalescence in their talking points over time – positioning themselves against ‘the establishment’, aligning themselves with white supremacist ideas, opposing gender policies and LGBTIQ+ rights, and pushing climate change disinformation …

And the final day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a session on transnational news that begins with Niusha Hansel and Linda Jean Kenix. Their study examines news coverage of the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to deport migrants. Some 600,000 undocumented immigrants have (supposedly) been deported during the first year of Trump’s second term, and a total of 2 million have left the US; this has also caused widespread protests, including the No Kings protests across the country.

How has this been reported internationally, across English-speaking countries UK, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Nigeria, and India? Common to these are …

The final speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is David Nolan, whose focus is specifically on constructions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the 2025 Australian federal election, in the wake of the Trump administration’s cancelling of DEI programmes in the US. Such interventions were seen as having the potential for a ‘Trump effect’ during the Australian election, too – with attempts by conservative politicians and others to create an ‘anti-woke’ groundswell.

Attacks on DEI programmes tend to misrepresent what such programmes aim to achieve: procedural and distributive justice in organisations and institutions. DEI is …