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) …

After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yiming Liu, whose focus is on the role of moralised content in online communication. This is often linked to moral contagion theory, but existing research on this is overreliant on observations from English-language studies, which may not translate well to other languages and cultures with their own cultural norms.

This study, therefore, uses the concept of ‘moral circle’: a boundary delimiting who or what deserves moral concern. This represents a series of expanding circles from the self, intimate relationships, the family, the social group, one’s own …