The third speaker in this opening plenary at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the great Daniel Kreiss, who shifts our focus to the role of tech firms in the context of democratic challenges. They may be seen as ‘democratic gatekeepers’, potentially playing a crucial role in keeping anti-democratic leaders and parties from power. Democracies are saved when there are strong political institutions to save them, but these institutions need to include media organisations and platforms as well.
Journalists are ‘civil gatekeepers’, then, who communicate ideas to the public about what is and is not democratic; when …
I’ve stepped in as the presenter of the second paper in this opening session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference – unfortunately my colleague Katharina Esau, who was meant to present today, has fallen ill. The work we are presenting here is one of the early conceptual outcomes of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship on partisanship and polarisation, and both explores the concept of polarisation as current literature from a variety of fields describes it, and outlines five key symptoms of what we define as destructive polarisation that require further scholarly attention and empirical analysis.
It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig. His work is usually on mis- and disinformation, and he is interested in the underlying conditions of the digital knowledge society which supported the emergence of such information (dis)orders. His key concept here is the idea of counter-knowledge orders, with particular focus on the far right.
In contemporary society, falsehood is identified as a ‘disorder’ …
