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Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles

Snurb — Wednesday 24 September 2025 18:17

A Brief History of AlgorithmWatch and Its Fight for Algorithmic Accountability

Politics | Government | Journalism | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Search Engines | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | SEASON 2025 | Liveblog |

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 …

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Snurb — Wednesday 17 September 2025 04:06

A First Talk on a New Journey

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Travel | Journalism | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) |

I'm travelling again, on a trip that will take me to the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Studies in Aarhus, the 20th anniversary of the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung in Bremen, the Search Engines and Society 2025 conference in Hamburg, and the AoIR 2025 conference in Niterói, amongst a few other destinations – but my first stop has been Brussels, where I was delighted to participate in Nathalie van Raemdonck's PhD defence at IMEC-SMIT, and to be the inaugural speaker in a new seminar series of the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies (BrIAS). 

In my …

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Snurb — Wednesday 17 September 2025 03:49

Investigating the Dynamics of Destructive Polarisation in Public Communication (BrIAS 2025)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) |

BrIAS 2025

Investigating the Dynamics of Destructive Polarisation in Public Communication

Axel Bruns

  • 15 Sep. 2025 – Invited seminar at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies, Brussels

Presentation Video

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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 20:22

Introducing Practice Mapping as a Means to Assess Destructive Polarisation

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Liveblog |

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 20:08

Assessing the State of Research on Online Deliberation

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Liveblog |

The second day at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld starts with Dennis Frieß, whose interest is in AI and deliberation. He notes the importance of online publics for deliberation; however, they often do not live up to the ideal norms of deliberation, due to a lack of equality, rationality, and reciprocity as well as problems with incivility.

There have been various attempts to counter this, through law enforcement, moderation, civil society initiatives, and other means; most recently, there is considerable interest in using artificial intelligence to support high-quality, deliberative online discussions.

What problems are there …

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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 02:03

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach (BBB 2025)

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Bots Building Bridges 2025 |

BBB 2025

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach

Axel Bruns

  • 12 June 2025 – Bots Building Bridges workshop, Bielefeld

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Wednesday 11 June 2025 20:23

An Overview of the Bots Building Bridges Project

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Twitter | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Liveblog |

It’s a Wednesday in Germany, and I’m in Bielefeld for a workshop of the Bots Building Bridges (3B) project. We start with an overview of the project’s activities to date, with Florian Muhle, Ole Pütz, Rob Ackland, and Matthias Orlikowski. The project focusses on online political discourse, and the dysfunctions in such discourse that are apparent in social media environments. This also addresses the questions of ‘echo chambers’, of polarisation, and of impacts on democratic discourse. Social media are not solely to blame for this: it may also be possible to support productive political discourse through social media, given the …

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Snurb — Thursday 5 June 2025 22:33

Do Digital Safe Spaces Curb Serendipitous Exposure?

Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Marko Skoric, who begins by drawing parallels between the early cable TV and late social media eras: cable TV, in its early days, was similarly social and diverse in its programming.

Social media, though, can also enable the gathering of like-minded groups, as well as the unsocial exclusion of others whose interests do not match our own; but there is also a shift from networked to clustered publics, where members of the same cluster no longer necessarily know or are even aware of each other. These taste-based clusters maximise …

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Snurb — Saturday 31 May 2025 12:33

Introducing Practice Mapping, at Home and Abroad

Politics | Polarisation | Travel | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ACSPRI 2024 | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

I'm about to head off on a brief trip to Germany for a series of conferences and presentations, so this seems like a good moment for another update on recent developments. First off, I'm delighted to finally have a first publication out in the great Social Media + Society journal that introduces our new methodological approach of practice mapping. I've teased this in a few past posts and presentations already, not least in my keynote at the ACSPRI conference in November 2024, but together with my great QUT colleagues Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden …

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Snurb — Monday 23 December 2024 16:01

A Final Round-Up of Publications and Other Updates from 2024

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | AANZCA 2024 | ACSPRI 2024 | AoIR 2024 | ECREA 2024 | ICA 2023 |

I disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:

 

Polarisation, Destructive

…

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Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles
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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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