The second day at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with a keynote by Nick Couldry, focussing on the corporatisation of media and everything. He notes a number of key changes over the past twenty years: datafication – the transformation of everyday life into data, and its exploitation by business and government, thereby producing the social for capital; social media – shifting the exploitation of social data to produce attention and shape consumer and citizen action; and artificial intelligence – the corporate capture of the human mind itself, which automates cognitive production and transforms what we value.

This …

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 …

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 …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Ari Stillman, whose interest is in Reddit data analysis. Historically, Reddit has provided data on activities on the platform quite openly; its leaders had been strongly committed to open access and data sharing, but this changed substantially some 1.5 years ago when Reddit restricted its API, however.

This caused outrage in the user community, and especially amongst the unpaid community moderator workforce who relied substantially on API access to automate some aspects of their work. Following highly controversial debate, Reddit promised a Reddit 4 Researchers programme, yet this …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, presenting a study of pro-Bolsonaro narratives on Facebook in Brazil. The key question here is whether online hyperpartisan groups are as stable as they are thought to be; is that true, and how does such stability fare in times of intense political crisis?

Brazil is an obvious case for the study of such questions. The project tracked some 59 pro-Bolsonaro accounts between 2021 and 2023, a timeframe including Bolsonaro’s election loss against Lula and his subsequent coup attempt. The dataset contains some 12 million …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting a comprehensive review of the state of the art in the use of LLMs in content analysis research. This review focusses on the use of LLMs to analyse human-generated text, understood as a social phenomenon. This extends past reviews of computational text analysis methods that were published in previous years: the considerable growth in LLM use has made it necessary to return to the recent literature to examine how computational methodologies have evolved since then.

Past methods have enabled the analysis of …

We start the first day of the AoIR 2025 conference proper with a panel on LLMs in research that involves several members of my QUT team. We start with a paper by Paul Pressmann, though, whose focus is on using LLMs in processing open-text responses from survey studies. The interest here is especially in questions of polarisation.

The data for this come from the POLTRACK project, which investigates the interrelations between individualised online information environments and polarisation. This combines Web tracking and surveys of some 2,000 participants. The survey component includes both closed- and open-ended questions that are used to …

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) …