Polarisation

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented on behalf of Chao Wu and Michelle Seelig, and focusses on public discussions of the COP21 (2016) and COP25 (2020) climate conferences on Reddit, with a particular focus on climate-contrarian comments.

Climate-contrarian claims were identified through the CARDS framework and its claims classifiers; this sorts claims into five broad categories of typical climate change-denialist rhetoric. The project then also conducted topic modelling, and clustered topics by their affinity with each other. This showed clear distinctions between the two events, with more issued-centred …

As I wrap up my Mercator Fellowship at ZeMKI in Bremen, I’ve made a side trip to the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which starts for me with a session on the application of network analysis to polarised contexts. We start with Shengyi Gao, whose interest is in group polarisation. She notes the growing fragmentation of social media environments, which creates structural holes in such networks; some users are ‘structural hole spanners’, however, who bridge such gaps by their activities.

The focus here is on Weibo, and the network is constructed from post forwarding activities; the posts …

And the next session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with Ofra Klein, who will outline the challenges of studying far-right mobilisation in spite of the constraints of social media data access regimes. The far right use social media very extensively to promote their propaganda, and this can lead to physical demonstrations, riots, and violence; as and when this happens, social media posts and accounts are then often removed by the perpetrators of the platforms, complicating any meaningful research.

In addition, the number of platforms used for far-right agitation have diversified substantially; in addition …

It’s a chilly Tuesday in Frankfurt, the Matildas just advanced to the final of the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup, and I’m at the opening of the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, co-organised by my dear friend Katrin Weller from GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. The programme begins with a day in German, and opens with a paper by Pascal Siegers, who introduces the AVERA project. This emerged from a federal ministry project supporting the collection and sharing of data from research projects on racism and far-right extremism, and a first need it …

It's mid-February already, which means that here at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre we've just concluded another very engaging DMRC Summer School, with participants from around the world – many thanks to everyone who joined us for this.

One of the new segments in the programme this year was a session on 'Re-Thinking Media for the Platform Age', with several contributions from DMRC research leaders on current topics of interest. In my own talk for this, I revisited the idea of the public sphere once again, continuing a thought process that spans from my Information Policy article in …