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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 13:42

What News Does Microsoft Copilot Actually Recommend?

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Artificial Intelligence | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Timothy Koskie, looking for media pluralism in AI-generated local news. But actually, these systems are not necessarily artificial intelligence in the full sense of the term: they are simply content generators. These systems feed on media content, and will make mistakes as they do so; this is not necessarily all that different from human-driven news media, however.

But how do AI content generators fit into the media ecosystem? Can they contribute to media pluralism, and thereby increase the media ecosystem’s health? If so, this could considerably …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 13:19

The Changing Sentiment of BBC News’ Coverage of Afghanistan

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

And the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Haroon Hakimi, whose focus is on the BBC’s representation of Afghanistan in its news reporting. Internationally, people are often perceived through the popular image of their nation, and this is especially pronounced for countries which many people will have no personal experience of, such as Afghanistan.

More generally, national image can be shaped at the personal level, through friends and contacts; at the organisational level, where PR companies might run image campaigns; and the mass media level, where news reporting strongly affects how audiences perceive …

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 12:44

Framing the Fukushima Waste Water Release in Chinese and Korean Media

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on news and social media framing, and starts with Xu Pengfei, examining how Chinese and Korean news reported on the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge in 2023. Chinese and Korean news outlets reported intensively on this, given the fears about how the nuclear waste might affect their coastal regions.

Key to this study is news framing theory, which tends to identify a number of key framing approaches; in East Asia, historical frames are especially common in international reporting. How, then, did Chinese and Korean media frame the event, and what …

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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 00:42

Artificial Amplification in a Hybrid Media System: The Case of #LaschetLacht

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …

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Snurb — Thursday 5 June 2025 22:26

A New Framework for Exploring Diverse News Content

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Search Engines | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 | Liveblog |

I’m presenting some early results of our large-scale dynamic practice mapping of Australian climate change discussions on Facebook later in this next session at the Weizenbaum Conference, but we begin with a paper by Konstantin Lackner, Markus Uhlmann, and Viktoria Horn. Their focus is on news navigation and recommendation: recommendations enable users to navigate information overload, but also create potential monetary gain for content sources.

Recommendations can be problematic because they optimise for retention and attention, and therefore for profit; this is also increasingly done through AI; and the result of such recommendations may be that users no longer …

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Snurb — Monday 23 December 2024 16:01

A Final Round-Up of Publications and Other Updates from 2024

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | AANZCA 2024 | ACSPRI 2024 | AoIR 2024 | ECREA 2024 | ICA 2023 |

I disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:

 

Polarisation, Destructive

…

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 15:40

Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum (AANZCA 2024)

Elections | Government | Polarisation | Politics | AANZCA 2024 | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Industrial Journalism | Journalism | Practice Mapping |
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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:52

For Different Generations, What Even Is News?

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kirsty Anderson, whose interest is in how younger and older news audiences use the news differently. Interviews with news users bear this out: for younger users news is whatever pops up on their social media feeds, while older users might regard only fully fact-checked information as news.

News is critical to societies, of course, and journalism has a special status in terms of news. But this is under threat as news is now available anywhere, any time, and also from sources other than conventional journalism. This is also expressed in …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:51

Distinguishing Political from General News Avoidance

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Caroline Fisher and Renee Barnes, whose interest is in news avoidance. They begin by noting the global rise in news avoidance in recent years (not least following the COVID-19 pandemic), and this raises considerable concerns for democratic engagement in society.

But not all news avoidance is equal: avoiding sports news, for instance, has a significantly less substantial impact on democratic functions than avoiding political news. Political journalism, which centrally addresses journalism’s watchdog role, is considerably more important in this context, but its frequent use of jargon as well as its …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:49

Source and Engagement Diversity for Australian News on Facebook

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | AANZCA 2024 |

The final day at thre AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a session on online news consumption, and the first speaker is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in source and exposure diversity on Facebook. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in Australia, but the future of news on the platform is in some doubt, given the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code and Meta’s intention to downrank or even remove news from its platforms.

This materially affects news outlets, as it also reduces traffic to their sites; but another key question here is how it impacts on the …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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