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Snurb — Friday 25 April 2025 14:32

Some Updates from the 2025 Australian Federal Election Campaign (and More Articles on Polarisation)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) |

The 2025 Australian federal election is in full swing, with just over one week to go before the 3 May 2025 election date. As in previous elections, my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have been following the social media campaign with particular interest, and have now published a mid-campaign update on the electioneering process as it's unfolded especially on Facebook and Instagram – our overview of current patterns and dynamics is now live on the DMRC Website.

Our work is made considerably more difficult, though, by the severe deterioration of data access to leading …

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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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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 13:57

Studying Airline Cabin Crew Training through Participant Observation

ACSPRI 2024 | Liveblog |

The final speaker for this session, and the ACSPRI 2024 conference overall, is María Larrea, and her interest is in the learning journeys of airline cabin crews. María has worked as a flight attendant and crew trainer and manager herself, and questions the extent to which formal training actually prepares cabin crew for their work.

Such training is often in a formal setting in classrooms rather than simulated cabin environments; the airline industry is highly regulated, and cabin crew activities are highly influenced by psychological perspectives, but drawing on sociocultural perspectives that see learning as a situated experience in natural …

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 13:34

Assessing Patients’ Hospital Experiences through Participatory Action Research

ACSPRI 2024 |

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kelly Edwards, whose focus is on healthcare provision: how do we measure what actually matters to patients? Surveying experiences rather than merely satisfaction is important here: qualitative, real-time surveys that were co-created with patients and are used to share feedback with nurses should be seen as the most desirable aim here, but are uncommon in everyday practice.

This is a call for participatory action research, then: a collaborative, iterative approach that is action-oriented. Such research is not easy, however, especially within standard ethics frameworks that require the research project to …

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 13:18

Approaches to Interviewing Adolescents through WhatsApp

Social Media | ACSPRI 2024 |

The next speaker in this final ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kirstie Northfield, whose focus is on conducting interviews with adolescents through instant messaging services. This is in the service of a project on adolescent mobbing. Plenty of work has been done on quality of life assessments for adolescents through parents and teachers as proxy reporters, but these are not always accurate: in parallel reporting tests, mothers’ assessments appear to be most closely matched to adolescents’ actual experiences, while teachers’ reports have not been well tested by by parallel studies.

Who, then, is a reliable judge of adolescent wellbeing? How …

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 12:50

Comparing the Impacts of Sports and Formal Uniforms on School Students

ACSPRI 2024 |

The final session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference starts with Carly Gardner, whose focus is on the impact of form school uniform policies on physical activities in school kids. Physical activity is critically important in improving health and protecting against chronic diseases, but school uniforms are often very formal and restrict movement; some schools therefore allow kids to wear their sports uniforms at least one day per week, and there may be an argument to use these as everyday uniforms.

From a first survey, 62% of school students surveyed would support this approach, but further research is required to examine …

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 09:39

Introducing Practice Mapping

Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ACSPRI 2024 |

I’m the next speaker at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, presenting our new practice mapping method for this study of multimodal networks. Slides are below:

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 09:31

Prominent Themes in Data Sovereignty Debates Online

Politics | 'Big Data' | Social Media Network Mapping | ACSPRI 2024 |

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large …

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 09:14

Intersections between Alt-Right, Gamergate, and MAGA Subreddits

Politics | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | ACSPRI 2024 |

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Nicholas Corbett, whose focus is on ties between the alt-right, Gamergate, and the MAGA movement on Reddit. This entanglement has taken place for the best part of the past ten years or so, but exactly how strong are the links between these groups, and how does this manifest on Reddit’s?

This project explores a network of some 51 relevant subreddits that share a certain amount of participants. The focus here is especially on the subreddit’s core constituency: those users who participate more in the specific subreddit than in any of …

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 08:56

Identifying the Multi-Modal Features of Social Media Posts Engaging in Modern Slavery Recruitment

Social Media | ACSPRI 2024 |

The third speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Mingming Cheng, whose focus is on the use of multi-modal data in the analysis of modern slavery risks on social media. Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced marriage, human trafficking, debt bondage, and other related practices; it targets vulnerable individuals, and these might also be identified through social media (for instance through ads or recruitment posts that mimic ordinary advertising).

Such content can spread very rapidly, and identifying and regulating it is very difficult. It requires a multi-modal approach that analyses visual, audio, and text data, and the present project …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

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

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Books, Papers, Articles

Destructive Polarization in Digital Communication Contexts: A Critical Review and Conceptual Framework (Information, Communication & Society)

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Opinion and Press

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

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Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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