Challenging the Discord Dividend
Authors: Westling, C. and Bjurling, O.
Conference: ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2026
Dates: 7-10 April 2026
Abstract:In the digital public sphere, identity-driven rhetoric, whether on the political right or left, is synergistic with platform incentives as it raises the temperature and intensity of political discourse through polarisation and increased engagement, which generates revenue. Since the Cambridge Analytica exposé of how voter behaviours leading up to the Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2016 US presidential election were modelled and manipulated, awareness of how digital environments can be used to shape political discourses and outcomes in the real world has been raised, but it remains a live concern.
From an industry perspective, it was clear that multi-platform, or so-called 360-degree marketing methods that were originally designed for brand building, were subverted to drive polarisation of political discourses by 2013-2014. To understand how multi-platform marketing methodologies are used to distort public spheres that are upheld by liberal democratic processes and foment populism, the political map is more usefully conceptualised as a circle around a consensus-based political centre than as a left-right spectrum. In this view, populist positions and fringe politics are oriented around the perimeter and pulling away from negotiated consensus and shared principles. In digital spaces, such diverse peripheral positions or identities can be coordinated at scale and exploited to erode the perception of civic cohesion, create discord, and subvert 360-degree brand building to mimic emergence.
While most people flatter themselves as being inured to marketing, social instincts generate fear of exposure or finding ourselves in out-groups. A contested centre pushes more people into tribes or polarised identities, which optimises conditions for populism, including its authoritarian variant. Identity is not only a vehicle in populist rhetoric, but also the base commodity in the attention/intention economy. Identity segmentation is fundamental to the incentive mechanisms that underpin social media platforms under the personalisation paradigm, and the monetisation models it generates. How identities are modelled determines the metrics that are used to drive revenue and shapes the incentives that are embedded in infrastructure, interface, and interaction design. Thus, identity is a vector for social engineering on digital platforms, mediated by the metrics it affords.
Drawing on time-tested modelling approaches from live event and civic design, our research reconceptualises digital publics as emergent sociotechnical collective systems instead of atomised agents. In place of the statistically compressed identities that serve as models of agents, we propose alternatives based on models of collectivised agency, conceptualised as emergent, situated crowd behaviour. By adapting existing methods in computational fluid dynamics, we aim to identify metrics that mirror those used in civic and event design for live publics. Selected metrics of crowd agency will be investigated to explore how systemic incentives, at scale, can reflect essential parameters for ethical and aesthetically successful real-world design. Our research invites informed critique and collaboration and incorporates tracing the incentive cascades that flow from different metrics, including those used for current monetisation mechanisms, through table-top red testing and simulations to support civics-centred platform governance in alignment with new and emerging European legislation.
Source: Manual