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Snurb — Friday 24 October 2025 00:44

Using Practice Mapping to Diagnose Destructive Polarisation

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ZeMKI 2025 | Liveblog |

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

diagnosing-destructive-polarisation-in-public-discourse-the-practice-mapping-framework-1913from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Thursday 23 October 2025 23:02

Embedded Collaborative Research for Better Scholarly Impact

Politics | Government | Internet Technologies | ZeMKI 2025 | Liveblog |

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’ve chosen is on the digital society, and begins with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and a paper on actionable research. Universities are under great political and financial pressure around the world at the moment, and this has led to an increased emphasis on knowledge transfer, open science, and public engagement for scholarly work, but such emphases are not well-aligned with internal reward structures in academia at this stage.

While society is understood to be deeply in need of our expertise, this enshrines a pattern where knowledge is produced within …

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Snurb — Thursday 23 October 2025 20:32

How Government Leaders’ Self-Branding Undermines Trust

Politics | Government | Social Media | ZeMKI 2025 | Liveblog |

The second presentation in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is by Ruth Garland, with a focus on disinformation and the people. How, in particular, can governments communicate effectively in an age of disinformation? What if governments themselves embrace the tools of disinformation for branding and propaganda via their social media channels?

Ruth’s focus here is especially on former UK Chancellor and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s personal branding strategies via official government social media accounts; this contradicts past conventions of impartiality, and takes place in an environment of increasingly partisan media outlets in the UK and …

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Snurb — Thursday 23 October 2025 18:44

Towards a Eurostack of Sovereign Digital Infrastructures Embedding Public Values

Politics | Government | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Search Engines | Social Media | ZeMKI 2025 | Liveblog |

After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …

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Snurb — Sunday 19 October 2025 00:02

Analysing 78 Years (!) of Climate Debate in Brazilian Federal Parliament

Politics | Government | Polarisation | AoIR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Thales Rodrigues Antonelli, whose interest is in how climate issues are instrumentalised in parliamentarian debates, taking a very long-term perspective stretching over some 78 years. This requires a taxonomy of such claims, which also enables a connection of domestic debates in Brazil with broader debates around the world.

The key focus here is on the connection between land use and climate change. Land use changes – which for instance cause deforestation – are a key issue in Brazil; this also continues concerns that date back to the impacts …

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Snurb — Sunday 19 October 2025 00:00

Discourse Alliances for an against Nuclear Power in Australian Political Debate and News Coverage

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AoIR 2025 | Liveblog |

The third speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the dynamics of division and delay in Australian climate and energy discussions. Australia has had a long history of ‘climate wars’ over the appropriate climate policy; during the last election, the conservative opposition pushed for a nuclear energy initiative in part as a means to delay the transition towards renewable energies, for example.

Australians’ understanding of climate change and of the current energy mix is generally limited, and there is considerable opposition especially on the conservative side to net …

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Snurb — Saturday 18 October 2025 10:13

Patterns in Instagram Posts by Brazilian Congresswomen about Anti-Abortion Laws

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | AoIR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Camilla Tavares, whose focus is on the posts of Brazilian congresswomen who spoke out on Instagram about a proposed constitutional amendment that sought to prohibit legal abortion. Brazil has historically had a high level of gender inequality in parliamentary representation; even though it elected a record number of female representatives in the past election, still only 91 of 513 representatives in the federal parliament are female, and a substantial number of them hold highly conservative positions.

A proposed constitutional amendment in 2024 sought to establish a right to …

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Snurb — Saturday 18 October 2025 04:05

Diverging Role Definitions for Data Protection Officers in Norway, Kenya, and China

Government | 'Big Data' | AoIR 2025 | Liveblog |

The second speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the great Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on government strategies for protecting citizens’ rights to their user data. This has become particularly critical in the context of generative AI, which uses user data to train Large Language Models; additionally, there is also the constant datafication of citizens in many other contexts.

This is being addressed in part through Data Protection Officers (PDOs): these are tasked with taking care of and championing data privacy. Who are these people, and what are their tasks? Is there alignment between policies and …

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Snurb — Thursday 16 October 2025 08:45

Internet Research as a Form of Resistance

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | AoIR 2025 | Liveblog |

It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …

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Snurb — Wednesday 15 October 2025 03:03

Tracking Shifts in Discursive Alliances: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping (AoIR 2025)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AoIR 2025 |

AoIR 2025

Tracking Shifts in Discursive Alliances: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping

Axel Bruns

  • 18 Oct. 2025 – Paper by Axel Bruns, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Tariq Choucair, Laura Vodden, and Ehsan Dehghan, presented at the 2025 Association of Internet Researchers conference, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro

Presentation Slides

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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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