The researchers started from a puzzle. In science and technology studies, a controversy is not merely public disagreement. It is a sustained, traceable dispute in which experts challenge one another, lay participants develop genuine expertise, and stable groups of concerned citizens form around a specific issue. Think of debates over nuclear waste siting or vaccine safety, where affected publics acquire technical vocabulary, contest official evidence, and organize into durable issue publics. AI, despite endless declarations of its controversial nature, shows remarkably few of these features. A search of the scholarly literature confirmed the authors’ suspicion: when researchers use the word controversy in connection with AI, they overwhelmingly mean generic public disagreement or scandal, not the analytical apparatus of controversy mapping.

Romele and his colleagues argue that this diagnosis of absence mistakes the form of the conflict for its existence. The conflict over AI is real, but it has been displaced along two axes. Horizontally, it has moved from the inaccessible technical object, whose inner workings few citizens can meaningfully contest, onto the imaginaries surrounding it: visions of job destruction, surveillance, and institutional capture. Vertically, it has shifted from a controversy among citizens and experts into an antagonism that opposes a unified people to an institutional order that AI is taken to embody. To read this displaced conflict, the authors contend, the standard tools of controversy analysis must be supplemented with political theory.

The theoretical move draws on the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Where controversy analysis assumes that legitimate participation requires expertise and that the reality of conflict resides in technical objects, hegemony theory treats symbolic formations as genuine sites of political struggle. In this framework, AI functions as what Laclau called an empty signifier: a condensed symbol onto which heterogeneous grievances, from unemployment to the cost of living to distrust of media and elites, can be articulated. The resulting structure is populist in a precise, non-pejorative sense, constructing a people against an adversary understood as the institutional establishment.

The empirical backbone of the study is a dataset of 1,148,092 comments posted on 4,244 videos from TF1.info, the YouTube channel of France’s largest private television broadcaster. The team compared the publics that gather around AI videos with those forming around three other contested technoscientific domains: electric vehicles, nuclear technologies, and climate change. They then mapped the intersections between these issue publics and the publics of French political parties, asking whether engagement with AI tracks partisan affiliation the way engagement with climate or nuclear energy does.

The quantitative mapping delivered a striking negative result. Around electric vehicles, nuclear power, and climate change, the researchers could identify relatively coherent issue publics whose activity intersects in patterned ways with party-political communities. Around AI, no such structure emerged. Public formation was weak: commenters on AI videos did not cluster into stable, recognizable constituencies, and their overlap with partisan publics was comparatively thin. In the vocabulary of controversy studies, AI has not generated the issue publics that a genuine technoscientific controversy would produce. The technology is talked about everywhere, but it belongs to no one in particular.

The qualitative analysis explains what is happening instead. The researchers read in their entirety the comments on 23 AI-related videos, attending to three dimensions: whether a comment used a technical register, where its critique was aimed, and whether AI was linked to grievances external to the technology. A comment was treated as expressing vertical antagonism only when it combined the last two features, directing critique upward at institutions, elites, or media while folding AI into a broader chain of grievances. Ordinary negativity about the technology’s performance, humor without an institutional target, and disagreement among commenters were explicitly not counted as antagonism.

What emerged from this close reading was a consistent pattern. Commenters rarely engaged with AI at a technical level. There was little specialized vocabulary, few references to documentation, and almost no design-level argument of the kind the authors found in the electric vehicle comments, where users debated battery energy density, thermal constraints, and the carbon debt of manufacturing with genuine specificity. Instead, AI comments aimed their fire at institutional actors and articulated the technology as one element in a wider story of dispossession: jobs lost, purchasing power eroded, representation hollowed out, and a media class that talks down to ordinary people. AI condensed institutional power into a single, graspable target.

This finding reframes a debate that has preoccupied scholars and policymakers. A growing body of work has called for eliciting the AI controversies we need, seeking to provoke the lay expertise and issue publics that AI has so far failed to generate. Romele and his colleagues push back against this program. If the conflict over AI is not a missing controversy but a displaced antagonism, then the task is not to engineer the former but to recognize the latter. Treating populist anger about AI as a deficit of technical deliberation misreads the situation and risks deepening the very estrangement it hopes to cure.

The implications reach beyond France and beyond YouTube. As governments roll out national AI strategies and corporations flood the public sphere with sociotechnical imaginaries of transformation, the symbolic battlefield may matter more than the technical one. A democratic politics of AI, the authors suggest, begins by acknowledging that when people argue about artificial intelligence, they are often arguing about something else: who holds power, who benefits, and who gets to decide. Recognizing that conflict, rather than trying to redirect it into expert debate, is the precondition for giving it democratically sustainable form.

Subject of Research: Displaced political antagonism and populist conflict in public discourse on artificial intelligence

Article Title: Artificial intelligence as political antagonism: media traces of a displaced conflict

Article References: Romele, A., Bert-Erboul, C., & Mésangeau, J. (2026). Artificial intelligence as political antagonism: media traces of a displaced conflict. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03303-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03303-3

Keywords: artificial intelligence, populism, hegemony, controversy analysis, science and technology studies, YouTube comments, public debate, sociotechnical imaginaries, Laclau and Mouffe, media analysis, issue publics, AI & Society

Researchers Ilona Bontenbal and Hanna-Mari Husu of LUT University in Finland examined the online output of the national broadcaster NOS, the tabloid De Telegraaf and the newspaper de Volkskrant, using the Dutch keyword for sea-level rise to capture ten years of coverage. Of the 539 articles identified, 215 discussed some form of adaptation. Yet those discussions were far from evenly distributed: 111 articles focused on protection measures, while only 29 covered accommodation strategies such as floating homes or spatial planning, and just 30 mentioned retreat from the coast. The pattern was consistent across outlets regardless of political leaning, though De Telegraaf showed somewhat more variety and, notably, carried a strand of outright climate skepticism in roughly 15 percent of its sea-level rise articles.

To make sense of these patterns, the researchers applied a three-part framework of trust drawn from social science. Generalised trust reflects broad, background confidence that things will work out in the absence of reasons to doubt. System trust rests on formal institutions, laws, regulatory bodies and expert organisations. Process-based trust grows out of repeated interactions and accumulated track records over time. Each of these forms, the study shows, is mobilised in Dutch media reporting to shore up confidence in technological solutions, and each is conspicuously weaker when the coverage turns to accommodation or retreat.

Protection measures dominate the coverage because they are wrapped in every available layer of trust. Articles routinely imply that sea-level rise is technologically solvable if action is taken on time, with experts explaining that the Netherlands could likely keep defending itself against several metres of rise by adding sand and raising dikes. Process-based trust appears in frequent invocations of centuries of Dutch water management history, from the great Delta Works initiated after the devastating 1953 flood to storm surge barriers such as the Eastern Scheldt and Maeslant barriers. System trust is visible in the near-constant quotation of experts from the Delta Programme, the Deltares research institute, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and Dutch universities, whose voices appear in almost every article on the topic. Generalised trust surfaces in the confident assertion that the country can afford whatever engineering is required, with one professor of hydraulic engineering quoted in de Volkskrant estimating an extra billion euros per metre of sea-level rise per year and declaring that the Netherlands is perfectly positioned to pay it.

The media narratives also draw a sharp line between the Netherlands and the rest of the world in ways that reinforce national confidence. One water expert quoted in de Volkskrant captured the contrast with a wry observation: put a few Dutch people in a high-risk flood zone and they will start building dikes, whereas Americans who can afford it put their houses on poles and the rest are out of luck. Individual-level protection built by residents, common in less wealthy countries and on islands such as the Marshall Islands, is described in the Dutch press as something done elsewhere, with informal sea walls made of household waste and rusted car parts presented as a stark foil to professional, state-funded engineering at home. This juxtaposition, the authors argue, strengthens a narrative of Dutch exceptionalism in which adaptation belongs firmly in the hands of experts.

Even speculative mega-projects are absorbed into this techno-optimist frame. The coverage includes discussions of the proposed Northern European Enclosure Dam, a hypothetical structure of 637 kilometres of dams that would seal off the North Sea entirely, along with ideas for new artificial islands and vast pumps. These proposals are presented as technological imaginaries, distant but conceivable futures in which engineering ultimately prevails. Intriguingly, the societal implications of such radical reshaping of coastlines are barely discussed, which the researchers interpret as a sign that these ideas function less as serious near-term plans than as expressions of faith in the power of technology itself. Softer, nature-based protection such as beach nourishment and dune rehabilitation is also covered, often framed as the innovative way forward, working with nature rather than against it.

Accommodation strategies receive far less attention, and when they appear they are cast as futuristic rather than practical. Floating cities and floating neighbourhoods feature as long-term safety nets, mentioned with a certain lightness, as in one article that imagined the Dutch happily bobbing around with the rising sea while solving the housing shortage. More grounded accommodation measures, such as building houses on poles, are described as things done in the United States or on small island nations, not seriously contemplated for the Netherlands. Where accommodation does appear in practical form, it is through spatial planning: repeated reports that new housing should be built on higher ground, away from deep polders and low-lying river areas, with trust placed in the laws and regulations governing construction. Some experts also warn that the slow pace of sea-level rise breeds complacency, with too-high generalised trust leading people to assume that adaptation can simply be left to the professionals.

Retreat, by contrast, is framed as the option nobody wants to think about. Articles present it as a last resort that becomes relevant only if protection and accommodation fail, and experts interviewed in the coverage frequently express hope that the tide can be turned through emissions cuts instead. When relocation is discussed at all, it is imagined as movement from the low-lying western Netherlands to higher ground in the east, or occasionally migration to other European countries, presented without much doubt that neighbours would accept Dutch migrants. Mobility, the study notes, is portrayed as a real-time reality mainly for small island nations and poorer countries such as Bangladesh, not for the Dutch themselves. Several articles actively reassure readers that abandoning parts of the country this century is unlikely, even for areas lying below sea level.

Yet the analysis also uncovered important strands of distrust, particularly directed at the political system rather than at engineering. Experts quoted in the media complained that little serious thought is given to long-term alternatives beyond sand nourishment and raising dikes, signalling a lack of system trust in whether institutions will plan far enough ahead. Some researchers warned bluntly that adaptation alone will not suffice and that emissions must fall quickly, while others cautioned that hard protection has limits that will eventually force far-reaching decisions. De Telegraaf’s denial-oriented articles represented a different kind of distrust entirely, one aimed at the scientific assessments of sea-level rise itself rather than at any particular adaptation strategy, which the authors classify as system-based distrust of the underlying science.

The study’s central conclusion is that Dutch media coverage and the country’s policy orientation reinforce each other in a self-feeding loop. A water governance tradition built on technological protection shapes how journalists report on sea-level rise, and reporting that foregrounds engineering in turn sustains public imaginaries of continuity and business as usual, keeping transformative questions out of democratic debate and recasting political choices as technical problems for experts. The authors suggest that journalists and communicators deliberately broaden coverage to portray the full spectrum of adaptation options and their trade-offs, and communicate more clearly about the uncertainties and limits of protection-only approaches, so that decisions about how the Netherlands will live with the sea are returned to society as a whole rather than left solely to the engineers.

Subject of Research: Media representations of trust in adaptation strategies to sea-level rise in the Netherlands

Article Title: Building Techno-Scientific Trust in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise in the Dutch Online Media

Article References: Bontenbal, I., & Husu, H.-M. (2026). Building Techno-Scientific Trust in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise in the Dutch Online Media. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02620-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02620-z

Keywords: sea-level rise, Netherlands, climate adaptation, techno-scientific trust, media analysis, protection measures, managed retreat, flood risk management, environmental communication, Delta Works, climate resilience, system trust