The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’m attending is on digital publics, and starts with Maria Grub and Antonia Wurm, focussing on Twitch as a platform for political discussion in Germany. Twitch, of course, is usually known as a gaming platform which enables people to livestream their gaming sessions while viewers communicate in real-time through a live chat. This can also be monetised, with streamers making money and gaining access to early game releases.

However, users also encounter political content on the platform, at least incidentally; this seems to especially favour right-wing content, and …

And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.

In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Giovanna Mascheroni, whose focus is on discussions with communicative AI systems about controversial and polarising political issues. This was explored by the use of serious games, with ChatGPT performing the role of a political journalist arguing first against and then for the radical Last Generation climate protest group. The switch from one position to the other was made once ChatGPT’s arguments for started to repeat themselves. Students then did the same, and also interacted with ChatGPT as they did so, and a jury judged who …

The third speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on the role of journalism in fuelling discursive polarisation. He begins by referencing controversial public debates about radical climate protests, which usually evidence some level of discursive polarisation. Such polarisation may be ideological and/or affective, and and become destructive for public debate.

This contrasts with democratic transformative communication, which enables societies to address such conflicts productively. Literature has identified a number of factors that may polarise or depolarise; interestingly, exposure to dissonant views is often seen as polarising, but this …

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.

The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Stef Aupers, focussing on online conspiracy theories. These are not individual, but collectively shared, discussed, and shaped on social media. Existing research often focusses on platforms conspiracism, emphasising the role of technological features and platform affordances; what is much less frequently examined are the active and collective meaning-making practices through which groups of conspiracy theorists construct their online social identities.

This represents a participatory conspiracy culture which enables the social construction of identity; it performs boundary work through which conspiracist communities define and policy the …

For the first paper session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen I am in a session on disinformation and conspiracies, which starts with Marilia Gehrke and Eedan Amit-Danhi, whose focus is on gendered disinformation. Gendered disinformation includes manipulated images, using image editing and increasingly also generative AI; this often references sexuality and personal identity.

Much of the scholarship to date has tended to focus on gender or disinformation, but not on both together; it also tends to focus on intentionality, even though the harm that gendered disinformation produces does not depend on whether this content was shared with …

And the final speaker in this final paper session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor-Farfan, who focusses on the 2022 Australian federal election. She begins by noting the tensions between scale and depth in social media analysis: computational methods often privilege scale over depth, and there are now attempts to overcome this with the use of LLMs.

Her work draws on data from the two leading candidates’ – Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese – Facebook pages, from which she extracted the key narrative structures. An preliminary analysis of the key terms used by these political …