Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.

On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk …

I’ve not yet had the chance to write much about one of the major new projects I’m involved with: the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), a large-scale, multi-institutional, seven-year research centre that investigates the impact of automated decision-making technologies (including algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other such technologies) on all aspects of our personal and professional lives. In particular, for the first year of the Centre I’ve led the News & Media Focus Area, which recently held its inaugural symposium to take stock of current research projects and plan for the future. (This was …

In the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, I lead the Digital Publics programme – a growing collective of researchers who study the role of mainstream and social media as spaces for public communication. Over the past few years, this has necessarily required a particular focus on the dark sides of online communication, from the role of social, fringe, and mainstream media in the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories through the continuing transformation of the journalism industry to the problematic role of platform operators in shaping the environments for public communication. And these are …