Polarisation

I was next at the Weizenbaum Conference, presenting on our efforts to develop a dynamic practice mapping of climate change debates in Australia. Here are the slides, and for more information on the practice mapping approach see my recent post introducing the approach, and our first article in Social Media + Society about it…

The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.

To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …

The second speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Julian Maitra, whose focus is on the German far-right’s plans for ‘remigration’: the forced expulsion of legal migrants from Germany. Notably, that term is now also used by the Trump administration as it plans its own mass deportations of residents from the US.

Ideas surrounding such remigration rhetoric connect affective publics and affective polarisation with cumulative racism, platforms racism, and digital populism. Julian explored these debates by gathering public social media posts from Facebook and Instagram on this concept, and is interested how they evolved over time. There were …

I’m presenting some early results of our large-scale dynamic practice mapping of Australian climate change discussions on Facebook later in this next session at the Weizenbaum Conference, but we begin with a paper by Konstantin Lackner, Markus Uhlmann, and Viktoria Horn. Their focus is on news navigation and recommendation: recommendations enable users to navigate information overload, but also create potential monetary gain for content sources.

Recommendations can be problematic because they optimise for retention and attention, and therefore for profit; this is also increasingly done through AI; and the result of such recommendations may be that users no longer …

Up next in this Weizenbaum Conference session are Sabine Barthold and Richard Joos, whose interest is in fighting dark participation through digital vigilantism. Dark participation is a growing threat to online communities; it undermines functioning online communities and turns them into toxic and dysfunctional spaces, for political reasons. Such attacks are often orchestrated amongst large groups of actors.

Traditional counter-strategies are platform governance, but its effectiveness is strictly limited; and societal responses, but these often fail due to limited resources and understanding amongst law enforcement organisations. Instead, a further option may be to employ DIY defence approaches and swarming techniques …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Victoria Vziatysheva; she begins by noting that pre-existing beliefs affect what information we engage with – this is selective exposure. But studies have also shown that the use of search engines can reduce selective exposure; whether this is the case also depends on the way search queries are formulated in the first place, however.

Victoria’s project explored this in the context of a Swiss referendum on a responsible economy within the planet’s limits (which was ultimately rejected); this connected voting intentions on this referendum with search queries that reflected attitudes for …