The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is again my QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, this time presenting our research into how generative AI chatbots respond to queries about conspiracy theories. We have already seen how engagement with such chatbots can create harm, and it is important to examine what safety guardrails are in place to prevent chatbots from supporting conspiracy theories.
We examined this by assuming the persona of a casually curious chatbot user, asking a series of questions related to various such conspiracy theories. These include historical stories such as the assassination of John F …
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 …
The second paper in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by my QUT colleague Klaus Gröbner, whose focus is on transnational similarities between far-right news outlets. The far right has increasingly connected at a transnational level in recent years even in spite of its largely nationalist orientation; CPAC and the network of ‘patriot’ parties in Europe are both vehicles for this, and this has also led to a coalescence in their talking points over time – positioning themselves against ‘the establishment’, aligning themselves with white supremacist ideas, opposing gender policies and LGBTIQ+ rights, and pushing climate change disinformation …
And the final presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Gabrielle Princessa Wulaningatri, who returns us to the analysis of polarisation in Australian news media coverage. Ideological polarisation in the general population tends to correlate with attitudes towards climate action; such public polarisation is likely to also be reflected at least to some extent in news coverage of this topic.
The key focus here is on value framing in news media coverage; different values (from self-determination to traditionalism) also tend to be aligned with different ideological positionings. The study examined the presence of such values in the …
The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague (and freshly minted DECRA Fellow) Katharina Esau, whose interest is especially in patterns of polarisation within the media coverage of climate change. She begins by noting that polarisation remains a poorly defined concept, which includes notions of issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, value-based, and other forms of polarisation.
News media are usually perceived as polarised, too, but there is no robust way of assessing biases in and polarisation between different media outlets. This project, therefore, gathered data from some 26 Australian mainstream and fringe media outlets …
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:
I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.
The final session today at the AoIR 2025 conference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, who begins by introducing the challenge of assessing polarisation: there are many different definitions of polarisation, which require different measures of assessment. Most current methods fail to sufficiently distinguish between these types of polarisation.
Tariq is therefore proposing a new approach to assessing polarisation, which he has applied to the study of national electoral contests in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Peru. The focus here is to identify polarising rhetoric, including campaign attacks, and polarisation in broader public debates.
