I missed the first speaker in the next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, so we’re straight on to a paper by the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on partisan alignment, journalistic quality, and algorithmic amplification on Facebook. How do URLs that are shared the same number of times on Facebook reach audiences of vastly different sizes?

This study explores the impact of partisanship and quality on amplification and reach on Facebook, and also takes into account shifts in Facebook’s algorithmic governance design over the years. The structure of Facebook’s social networks is relatively …

The last speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Andrea Carson, whose focus is on Facebook response to the assassination of far-right US political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed during a public appearance, and this was widely assumed in the media to be a case of left-wing political violence, though this has yet to be established.

It produced considerable public reaction, with some controversial statements resulting in the sackings or suspensions of various journalists; social media responses ran the gamut from grief through outrage to political blame, and show …

Up next at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Ramin Soleymani, whose focus is on the analysis of social media content from a social ecological perspective. The use of social media has enabled digital nature experiences, somewhat making up for an overall decline in the direct nature experiences of an increasingly urban population; this might lead to the emergence of digital relational values including seeding, spreading, and grounding.

Relational values are a relatively new concept in the science policy arena; they complement nature’s instrumental (extractive) and intrinsic (inherent) values. Relational values refer to the relationships …

Day Two at the Social Media Access Days in Frankfurt starts with my keynote, taking stock of how we access and engage with social media data nearly ten years after the drastic changes to many platforms' data access regimes following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Back then, I wrote an article for Information, Communication & Society about the APIcalypse; how have things developed since then?

Here are my slides from the talk:

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote: