Political polarisation is blamed for eroding democratic trust and for our failure to address existential risks such as climate change. Yet what polarisation is, how it varies across countries, and whether it is rising remain contested.

Dr Max Falkenberg's work uses network science and large-scale digital data to study political attitudes and identities, the adversarial dynamics of online discourse, and the limits of interventions such as deplatforming. Much of what we attribute to the information age is harder to demonstrate than public debate implies, and this caution applies equally to AI. Concerns that it will exacerbate polarisation, through persuasion at scale and the spread of inauthentic content, are widespread but rest on limited evidence. Meanwhile, a growing literature shows that the same capabilities can be used to support deliberation and to correct misperceptions. Which effect will dominate depends less on the technology itself than on how, and where, it is used.

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This event is part of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s AI Frontiers series.

Meet the speaker

Dr Max Falkenberg is a computational social scientist and AI+ Senior Fellow in Informatics at King's, and an Associate Academic in Political Economy.

Trained as a physicist (PhD, Imperial College London), he recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Central European University in Vienna.

His research applies network science, statistical inference and AI to the study of political attitudes and communication, showing how ally-enemy dynamics on social media drive polarization, how climate scepticism surged after Musk's Twitter takeover, how deplatforming curbs harmful content online, and how fossil fuel financing has shifted between banks rather than declining.

He has contributed to a COP28 report on climate tipping points, presented at the Bank of England and the World Bank, and served as a policy analyst for the UK Parliament's EFRA Select Committee.