Polarisation

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections in Brazil; the former elected the far-right anti-establishment candidate Jair Bolsonaro, while the latter saw the return of leftist Lula.

This same period also saw significant changes to the Facebook algorithm, from a downranking of news during 2018 through the emergency measures enacted after the 2020 US presidential election and coup attempt to a 2022 reduction of ‘political’ content (by some nebulous in-house definition) in users’ personal feeds …

The final panel for today at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City involves quite a number of colleagues from my team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, and we start with Vish Padinjar, whose focus is on trajectories of radicalisation on Reddit. This focusses especially on the GamerGate misogynistic harassment campaign in 2014, which snowballed into a broader Manosphere campaign of harassment targetting supposed ‘social justice warriors’.

Vish explores this through Reddit discussions from January 2014 to December 2016 across several gaming-related, toxic masculine, and feminist subreddits. What happened here is a form of radicalisation …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Daniël de Zeeuw, whose focus is on the White House’s TikTok account and its appropriation of vibe-edits on the platform. On such platforms, multisensory streams and themes are complemented by fuzzy genres, and might be studied more appropriately through digital rhythm analysis that explores how we navigate digital media and digital media navigate us.

Vibes have become a medium for feelings, and describe a kind of postdigital intimacy where free-floating low-intensity emotion reigns and narrative recedes. Such vibes are now also increasingly …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marloes Geboers, whose interest is in content moderation on audiovisual social media platforms, with a focus on two 2024 German state elections. These elections have been noted for the substantial presence of TikTok videos related to the far-right AfD party, with limited moderation especially of hate speech where it existed in the audio layer rather than in on-screen captions.

But beyond this, there is also a question of how different ideological actors utilise this same latent space of the TikTok environment. Multi-modal …

It’s the first day in October, and I’ve made my way to the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, and we start today with a keynote by Jasper Tjaden from the University of Potsdam, whose topic is social media data acquisition through social research bots. This is especially valuable for social media audit studies; it moves beyond the understanding of bots as problematic actors that meddle in information and communication flows, and instead uses bots for good.

Such bots then become a vehicle for data collection, and fight for transparency in data science. One way of doing …

And the final speakers in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Corinna Hertweck and Giovanni Astante, whose focus is on voting in Switzerland’s frequent referenda. How do Google’s and Bing’s AI Overviews perform in such contexts?

Referenda happen at all levels of Swiss democracy, with approximately four such votes (sometimes on several issues) happen per annum, and are surrounded by lively public debate. Information retrieved from AI Overviews might play a significant role in influencing voters’ decision-making processes; importantly, too, such votes are binary yes/no choices, which makes them different from conventional election decisions.

How often …

The first paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg that I’m attending is on search engines and political information, and starts with Íris Damião, whose focus is on political bias in search engines and Large Language Models. Search engines have evolved a lot since they emerged in the 1990s, of course, but continue to be very widely trusted by their users – even when searching for some very sensitive information.

This is the case for instance when searching for election information, where people also search for information on election procedures, party programmes, and even whom to vote for …

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Claudia Thoms, who will present a semantic analysis of party competition in Germany. She begins by noting that political competition is also a competition over language, with parties trying to establish a distinct political profile. Issue emphases and positioning leave races in language, while strategic framing also shapes political perception itself.

Different parties want to associate themselves with different issues, to emphasise their competence on these issues; this also responds to ebbs and flows in public attention to specific issues. But issue relevance does not …

The post-lunch session on this last day at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on computational methods for political discourse analysis, and starts with Felipe Barreto-Storandt. He begins by noting the growing adoption of LLMs in communication research, but also highlights that there are no standard methodologies for using them yet; this is experimental at this point, and not a planned feature by their designers.

Often they are simply run once over a dataset, though, and this creates only one data point. But because LLMs are stochastic, they will produce different scores every time; this means that multiple runs …