Publications

After the conference is before the conference: after attending and blogging the ICA 2026 conference in Cape Town, I will be in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference next week, where I'll present a couple of papers and participate in a roundtable exploring our experiences with the Meta Content Library to date. More on those soon.

But ahead of that conference, I also have some major publication updates. Most importantly, I'm very pleased that the second edition of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics has now been published. The first edition came out in 2016 …

My twelve weeks as a Mercator Fellow at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) in Bremen are almost over already: I'll soon travel to Cape Town for the annual International Communication Association conference (more on this soon). I've had a great time here, and met some wonderful colleagues; the time has passed all too quickly.

My time in Bremen started with a presentation in the ComAI Lecture series at the Bremen Press Club, and I'm pleased to report that the video of the talk is now also available on the ZeMKI YouTube channel. The channel also has many …

As I write this I'm just about to head off to Germany for a keynote at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, followed by a three-month stay as a Mercator Fellow at the fabulous Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, thanks to the Communicative AI Research Unit. That stay will also enable me to visit a number of other colleagues and collaborators along the way, including at GESIS in Köln, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the University of Münster, the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, LMU München, and …

After my stops in Brussels, Aarhus, Hamburg, and Bergen I'm now on the Brazilian leg of this conference journey, having already visited Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre for satellite symposia before the AoIR 2025 conference proper begins tomorrow. Here are some updates from those events, and slides for my presentations.

In Belo Horizonte I presented a keynote at the colloquium “Perspectives on Public Spheres and the Network of Publics”, outlining my current thinking on what has replaced 'the' public sphere; the slides are here:

Axel Bruns. “From 'the' Public Sphere to a Network of …

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian …

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 …

(Crossposted from the Polity blog.)

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.

But these metaphors are built on very …

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.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of …