Like most of us, the current COVID-19 crisis has forced me to work from home for the foreseeable future, but my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have remained just as busy – in fact, of course, as a significant driver of journalistic coverage, of newssharing through social media (including both legitimate news and various forms of mis- and disinformation), and of general social media debate and discussion, the crisis intersects directly with some of our core research areas.
Many of us in this field now have urgent research projects in train that address some of …
The next session at AoIR 2019 starts with our paper on Twitter activity patterns in the 2019 Australian federal election, and I presented the first part of this so I didn’t blog it, but the slides are below.
My colleague Dan Angus has now taken over, and he presents his insights into the major topics being discussed in the tweet data. These divide into various policy topics that are both supportive and critical of the current government, and discussions about the electoral process; such themes …
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:
1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?
The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean …
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.
Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.
The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and 
But let’s begin with a reminder that my book 
The next session at 
