Polarisation

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 final speakers in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City are Camilla Folena and Enrico Mariani, whose focus is on the Telegram channels of the ViVi Warriors, who are an online/offline ‘non-violent’ movement that emerged in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meta banned them in 2021 as an adversarial network spreading COVID-19 misinformation, which forced them into the Telegramsphere.

The group has a clear social movement identity, which is visually well-defined and also used as a recruitment mechanism. Movements like this exploit the crisis of trust by establishing their own epistemic authority, contesting …

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 …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Michelle Kulig, whose focus is on perceptions of algorithmic recommender systems amongst news avoiders in the United States. The US political environment is characterised by terminal polarisation, with competitive news markets that incentivise outrage while being subjected to political pressures, and an absence of strong and trusted public service media that might function as an epistemic anchor.

News consumption here is now primarily via social media environments, which are to some extent algorithmically curated and therefore produce further epistemic disruption. There is …

The post-lunch panel at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Marco Bastos, who begins by introducing the various understandings of polarisation that exist in the literature. These also differ by the unity of analysis, and the present study focusses on narratives as its unit of analysis. Can these be quantified, and their polarising qualities assessed?

Narratives, put simply, are stories about how and why things happen. There are various structural models of narratives, such as Greimas’s actantial model, involving a key subject aided by supporters and frustrated …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Carolina Parreiras, whose focus is on the circulation of violent images on Telegram that would be censored on other platforms. Her focus here is especially on Brazil, and she is employing a lurker ethnography approach, during the Operação Contenção in late October and early November 2025.

Such lurking is a form of participant observation, but ethically and morally questionable, since the presence of the anthropologist in an online group is not visible to other members of that group; however, if the researcher …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Rita Hermann-Gsenger, whose focus is on the German Querdenken movement which emerged especially in response to COVID-19 government health measures; it started in early 2020 and peaked in August 2020, and used Telegram as a key tool for its own organisation.

The key interest here is on Querdenken’s monetisation ecosystem; this combines platform-mediated income with multi-channel monetisation strategies. It draws on heterogeneous monetisation streams in a layered environment of communication, payment, financial, and commercial infrastructures.

The approach to this can be split …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Christian Schwieter, whose focus is on deplatformed far-right activists on Telegram during COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How do such activists claim legitimacy during crises?

The focus here is on the UK far-right activist ‘Tommy Robinson’, a former leader of the fascist EDL who has self-styled himself now as a citizen journalist; and the Austrian Martin Sellner, an Identitarian influencer who is also the chief strategist of a ‘remigration masterplan’ endorsed by the German far right and presents himself as …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on the study of political defectors’ communication practices. This is influenced by the gradual incursion of social media logics into politics, which has led to the rise of political influencers as well as of politicians-as-influencers, as well as to a decline in partisan allegiance.

Overall, this has led to increasing doubt about the costs and benefits of being part of a party machine, and manifested in a growing number of political defectors who see …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on tracking the ideological trajectories of Australian political influencers (with a later extension to German influencers as well). Here, the focus is on high-visibility political influencers for the period of 2016 to 2025.

Such changes in position might point to an erasure of complexities, which is also a symptom of destructive polarisation. By adjusting their positioning on various issues, influencers may increasingly form antagonistic camps, leading to greater and more profound polarisation. Political influencers …