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My QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, focussing on how search engines respond to searches about conspiracy theories. Search engines are a common pathway towards conspiracist information; they have the potential to affect their users’ understanding of such information. What people see when they search for such content also depends directly on how the query itself is formulated, so query variations also need to be studied systematically. Our Australian Search Experience 2.0 project within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society explores the impact of such query …

The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.

How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …

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 …

Next up in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is the great Rowan Wilken, presenting a longitudinal study of news reports about dust storms in Victoria between 1992 and 2024. Dust storms are not uncommon in Australia, and exacerbated by periods of drought in arid and semi-arid areas; major storms are frequently covered by Australian news media. The focus of this paper is especially on dust storms in the Mallee, in northwestern Victoria.

What are the patterns that emerge in such news coverage, then; are there fixed formats for there coverage, or are there seasonal patterns to the journalistic …

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.

Our slides are below:

The third speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Natasha van Antwerpen, whose focus is also on the 2025 Australian federal election. Her interest is in the role of mis- and disinformation during the election. This connects with overall concerns about the effects of mis- and disinformation on societal cohesion, trust in institutions, moral decline, antisocial and harmful behaviours, etc.

Her project examined what mis- and disinformation individuals encountered during the election campaign. This was done through an experience survey: participants installed an app on their phones that would regularly ask them to report on their experiences …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Edward Hurcombe, whose focus is also on news in the 2025 Australian federal election. News consumption is now increasingly fragmented, with a growing number of younger voters no longer engaging with mainstream, legacy media; influencers were therefore invited to the 2025 budget lockdown, and PM Anthony Albanese appeared on influencer Abbie Chatfield’s podcast.

How was the election covered across traditional and social media news outlets in Australia, then? How do they imagine their audiences? Data were gathered from ABC News, The Age, The Guardian, news.com.au, and …

I’ll present in the first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, but we start with Kevin Tan, whose focus is on digital media strategies and voter engagement during the 2025 elections in Singapore and Australia. There is continued strong investment in digital communication by political parties, but in Australia in 2025 record ad spending coincided with declining digital engagement; in Singapore, opposition parties enjoyed strong digital momentum but this did not translate into editorial success.

Online attention tells one story, then, but the ballot box tells quite another: online signals are not reliable predictors of election outcomes. What exactly …