A Quartet of New Articles: Public Sphere, Platform Policy, Polarisation, and Social Media Data

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by Mike Schäfer and Mark Eisenegger. Here, I’m returning to my long-standing interest in dragging public sphere theory kicking and screaming into the digital age, by outlining a number of the fundamental building blocks of the network of publics that has become our everyday reality, and identifying some of the empirical approaches we may use to study those building blocks and their interrelationships in situ. Written in late 2022, many of the examples I use to illustrate these approaches are still drawn from waning social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, so one of the next challenges for our field will need to be to translate these approaches to new and emerging online platforms – and that will certainly also be an important aspect of my work over the coming years.

Axel Bruns. “From ‘the’ Public Sphere to a Network of Publics: Towards an Empirically Founded Model of Contemporary Public Communication Spaces.” Communication Theory, June 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ct/qtad007.

Second, and I’ve already foreshadowed this in my recent post collecting our presentations from ICA 2023, I’ve also been part of a multinational team led by my colleague Sofya Glazunova that developed the platform policy implementation audit approach in order to review the actions major social media platforms have (or haven’t) taken against the accounts and content of Russia’s key state propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We previewed our findings at ICA 2023, and the article presenting our approach and results has now also been published in Internet Policy Review. Across 13 propaganda accounts on six social media platforms as viewed from ten countries, we find widely diverging and often internally inconsistent measures taken by the platforms – and we encourage other researchers to continue this analysis in order to hold platforms and policy-makers to account.

Sofya Glazunova, Anna Ryzhova, Axel Bruns, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Arista Beseler, and Ehsan Dehghan. "A Platform Policy Implementation Audit of Actions against Russia’s State-Controlled Media." Internet Policy Review 12.2 (2023). DOI: 10.14763/2023.2.1711.

Third, and also previewed at ICA, we also have a first conceptual output from my current Australian Laureate Fellowship, led by my colleague Katharina Esau and involving almost the entire Laureate team. In the full paper accompanying our ICA presentation, we review the polarisation literature to make sense of the many, many competing conceptualisations of (various types of) polarisation, and to examine in particular at what point ‘ordinary’ polarisation turns destructive. The full paper from ICA is below, and we’re now further developing it for a journal submission in the near future.

Katharina Esau, Tariq Choucair, Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, Axel Bruns, Kate O'Connor, and Carly Lubicz. “Destructive Political Polarisation in the Context of Digital Communication – A Critical Literature Review and Conceptual Framework.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association conference, Toronto, 30 May 2023.

And last but not least, I’m pleased to say that a slightly older article has now finally also been published in the Sage Handbook of the Digital Society. Here, I chart the rise and – well, if not the complete fall, then certainly the emerging challenges to social media analytics in recent years, as access to social media data for critical, public-interest, independent research becomes increasingly difficult. As is the nature of these things, given the speed of print publishing in academia, the article has admittedly been overtaken somewhat by current events (and especially the continuing meltdown of Twitter): when I wrote it this time last year, the prevailing concern was about the supposedly imminent closure of Facebook’s (already limited) data portal CrowdTangle, while today CrowdTangle still remains available but the Twitter API has been severely crippled by the platform’s irresponsible and erratic new owner. Specific platforms aside, though, the underlying concerns remain as critically important as ever.

Axel Bruns. “Social Media Analytics: Boom and Bust?” The Sage Handbook of the Digital Society eds. William Housley, Adam Edwards, Roser Beneito-Montagut, and Richard Fitzgerald. London: Sage, 2023. 249–64. DOI: 10.4135/9781529783193.n15.

And that’s all for now. As always, there are a few more publications in the pipeline, and I’ll post about them as soon as they’re out – and of course there will be more presentations and more liveblogging as well as we approach the next round of conferences this year…