A Final Round-Up of Publications and Other Updates from 2024

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 or Otherwise

Central to the work of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship has been the development of our concept of destructive polarisation, and exploration of the five key symptoms we’ve identified for it: (a) breakdown of communication; (b) discrediting and dismissing of information; (c) erasure of complexities; (d) exacerbated attention to and space for extreme voices; and (e) exclusion through emotions. The point here is to distinguish such clearly problematic dynamics from other forms of polarisation that are more quotidian and benign, and may even be beneficial as they enable different sides of an argument to better define what they stand for. Where polarisation becomes destructive, on the other hand, mainstream political and societal cohesion declines and fails (and aren’t we seeing a lot of that at the moment…). I’ve got to pay tribute here to my Laureate Fellowship team, and especially the four Postdoctoral Research Associates Katharina Esau, Tariq dos Santos Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, and Samantha Vilkins – Katharina in particular drove the development of this concept from its first presentation at the 2023 ICA conference in Toronto to the comprehensive journal article which has now been published in Information, Communication & Society:

Katharina Esau, Tariq Choucair, Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard, Axel Bruns, Kate O'Connor-Farfan, and Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. “Destructive Polarization in Digital Communication Contexts: A Critical Review and Conceptual Framework.” Information, Communication & Society, 2024. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2024.2413127.

Meanwhile, I’ve led the writing on a second article that also outlines this concept and provides some further examples for its symptoms. This has now been published in the new Routledge Handbook of Political Campaigning, and counts as our first publication in 2025:

Axel Bruns, Tariq dos Santos Choucair, Katharina Esau, Sebastian Svegaard, and Samantha Vilkins. “Polarization in Online Spaces: Distinguishing Forms of Polarized Politics.” In Darren Lilleker, Daniel Jackson, Bente Kalsnes, Claudia Mellado, Filippo Trevisan, and Anastasia Veneti, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Political Campaigning. Oxon: Routledge, 2025. 45-57. DOI: 10.4324/9781003333326-5.

We’ve increasingly applied these concepts to a number of case studies (and there will be plenty more to come over the next twelve months). I’ve shared many of these here already as part of my conference liveblogging over the past months, but let me compile them a little more systematically now. Most importantly, we’re continuing to study the coverage of the Australian constitutional referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which was held in October 2023. As part of this, we’ve begun to contrast the arguably deeply destructive polarisation of social media debates which we’ve seen in Australia with the potentially more productive forms of polarisation which have emerged in debates on Indigenous recognition and rights in Aotearoa New Zealand:

Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, Laura Vodden, and Daniel Whelan-Shamy. “Representation? Treaty? Polarisation in News and Social Media Debates about Indigenous Rights in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.” Paper presented at the AoIR 2024 conference, Sheffield, 31 Oct. 2024.

Beyond the social media discussion, though, we’re interested in the way that news media choose to cover this and other public debates, too. At the AANZCA 2024 conference in Melbourne, Katharina Esau presented a first output from this work, based on a major manual content coding project she’s leading. Plenty more work to do here, but the first results are intriguing:

Katharina Esau, Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Samantha Vilkins, and Laura Vodden. “Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum.” Paper presented at the AANZCA 2024 conference, Melbourne, 26 Nov. 2024.

Work on news coverage is complicated, though, by the surprisingly difficult process of acquiring news data at scale. Decades after the news went online, this is a problem that still hasn’t been resolved – so we’re having to do quite a lot of work in plugging together various data sources and processing tools into an analytical pipeline, as data scientist Laura Vodden explained in her presentation at AoIR 2024:

Katharina Esau, Axel Bruns, Laura Vodden, Michelle Riedlinger, Samantha Vilkins, Laura Lefevre, and Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. “Challenges in Acquiring and Analysing News Data at Scale: A Case Study of News Polarisation in Australian Climate Change Coverage.” Paper presented at the AoIR 2024 conference, Sheffield, 2 Nov. 2024.

News media, social media, and polarisation also combined in our AoIR 2024 presentation on polarisation and newssharing in social media, together with my former PhD student Felix Münch from the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg:

Felix Münch, Axel Bruns, and Laura Vodden. “Polarisation in Newssharing: Reviewing the Evidence from Facebook and Twitter.” Paper presented at the AoIR 2024 conference, Sheffield, 2 Nov. 2024.

And as an offshoot from our Australian Search Experience project in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), we have begun to explore patterns of polarisation in the search results returned by Google News (with generally encouraging results):

Axel Bruns, Arjun Srinivas, Abdul Karim Obeid, James Meese, Daniel Angus, Timothy Graham, and Jean Burgess. “Polarisation via Search? Assessing the Political Spectrum of Google News Recommendations.” Paper presented at the AoIR 2024 conference, Sheffield, 2 Nov. 2024.

Along similar lines, my ADM+S colleague James Meese led the writing of our article in the Journal of Quantitative Description, which examines the exposure diversity that Australian Google News users experience:

James Meese, Abdul Karim Obeid, Daniel Angus, Axel Bruns, and Arjun Srinivas. “Examining Exposure Diversity on Google News in Australia.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4 (2024). DOI: 10.51685/jqd.2024.019.

Both of these outputs are also dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague, and QUT / ADM+S PhD student, Arjun Srinivas, who sadly passed after a traffic accident in early 2024. His contributions were also central to developing the second phase of the ADM+S Australian Search Experience project, which commences in 2025 and will continue to honour Arjun’s memory – more updates on this in the coming months.

First Steps in Practice Mapping

To support our empirical work on the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation, another key development this year has been our work on a new data analysis and visualisation method we call practice mapping. A first preprint on this approach is online now, and a full article will hopefully follow early in 2025 – but in the meantime I presented a keynote on this new approach at ACSPRI 2024, and a paper at AANZCA 2024:

Axel Bruns. “Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping.” Keynote presented at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, Sydney, 29 Nov. 2024.

Axel Bruns, Kateryna Kasianenko, Vishnuprasad Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. “Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks.” Paper presented at the AANZCA 2024 conference, Melbourne, 25 Nov. 2024.

We’re also using practice mapping in an analysis of Taylor Swift fan and anti-fan activities on Reddit:

Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard, Katherine M. FitzGerald, and Axel Bruns. “Mapping Network Actions and Interactions of Fan and Anti-Fan Subreddit Responses to Taylor Swift at Peak Saturation.” Paper presented at the AANZCA 2024 conference, Melbourne, 27 Nov. 2024.

Practice mapping as an idea combines a number of contributions into a greater whole: it is inspired especially by the work of two of my PhD students, Vishnuprasad Padinjaredath Suresh (who kickstarted our thinking on vectorising activity patterns and comparing them systematically) and Kateryna Kasianenko (who theorised the concept of the communicative practices of users and user communities). I am very peripherally involved in a new conference paper by Kateryna that explores the use of LLMs in the detection and categorisation of such communicative practices in response to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine:

Kateryna Kasianenko, Shima Khanehzar, Stephen Wan, Ehsan Dehghan, and Axel Bruns. “Detecting Online Community Practices with Large Language Models: A Case Study of Pro-Ukrainian Publics on Twitter.” In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, eds. Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen. Miami: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024. 20106–20135. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1122.

In the coming months, I’m sure we’ll apply the practice mapping approach to a growing range of case studies and application contexts, and further develop our analytical frameworks. More updates then!

Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers, in English and Now Also in Italian

I’ve probably said nearly all I’ll ever want to say about the misleading ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ concepts, and have hopefully made my contribution to their gradual decline and dismissal – but I’ve done so only in English so far. So, I was enormously excited when the great Giovanni Boccia Artieri proposed an Italian translation of my 2019 Polity Press book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, and that translation has now been published by the great Italian scholarly publishing house FrancoAngeli. Many, many thanks to Giovanni and his brilliant team of translators – all of them excellent scholars in their own right – for the work they’ve put into making this happen:

Axel Bruns. È Vero Che Internet Ci Chiude in una Bolla? Trans. Stefano Brilli, Elisabetta Zurovac, Manolo Farci, and Irina Spiridonova. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2024.

And in fact, as it turned out I wasn’t quite done with my own work on these concepts yet: I couldn’t say no to Johan Farkas and Marcus Maloney, who have just published a whole collection dedicated to digital media metaphors. The title of my chapter, incidentally, is a play on a great article for Vice Germany by the journalist Sebastian Meineck, which serves as a great critique of the concept:

Axel Bruns. “Filter Bubble: The Dumbest Metaphor on the Internet?” Digital Media Metaphors: A Critical Introduction, eds. Johan Farkas and Marcus Maloney. Oxon: Routledge, 2025. 65-77. DOI: 10.4324/9781032674612-8.

(Mis)adventures in Australian Social Media Policy-Making

And finally, 2024 also was the year when my colleagues and I were – fairly unwillingly – pulled into the swirling maelstrom of Australian Internet policy-making, through a number of related political developments. In part, this was because the band-aids placed on the failing Australian news media industry in the wake of 2021’s Facebook news ban are finally coming off: the limited deals made at the time to help the Australian federal government save some face as its News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) legislation blew up under it have now run their course, and so we’ve seen another round of lobbying from commercial news media for government to take money from social media platforms to prop up news operations.

In that context, my colleagues and I decided to explore a little further what actually happened during Australia’s week-long Facebook news ban – and found that the Australian Facebook was a substantially happier place during that time (with far fewer ‘angry’ reactions in response to links shared). No wonder Meta would be more than happy to remove news content from its platforms permanently, or at the very least downrank such content out of view of ordinary users. I presented a first exploration of these patterns at the ECREA and AANZCA conferences:

Axel Bruns, Dan Angus, Laura Vodden, Ashwin Nagappa, and Klaus Gröbner. “Facebook without the News: Link-Sharing Patterns during Meta’s Australian and Canadian News Bans.” Paper presented at the ECREA 2024 conference, Ljubljana, 27 Sep. 2024, and the AANZCA 2024 conference, Melbourne, 26 Nov. 2024.

With an NMBC-style policy, Bill C-18 – and consequently, an ongoing ban of news content on Meta’s platforms – in place in Canada since August 2023, and with jurisdictions elsewhere considering similar legislation even in spite of its deep and patently obvious flaws, I provided some reflections on the Australian experience at an event organised by the United States’ Computer and Communications Industry Association:

Axel Bruns. “Reflections on Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and Canada’s C-18 Bill.” Invited presentation at the US Computer & Communications Industry Association event “The Impact of Link Taxes on News and Beyond: Lessons from Australia and Canada”, online, 10 Sep. 2024.

Unsurprisingly, the fate of the News Media Bargaining Code was part of an ill-considered grab-bag of topics for the Australian federal parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, too. An omnibus enquiry addressing far too many unrelated topics in far too little time, the Committee’s outputs left much to be desired, and have already been overtaken by subsequent policy-making initiatives. Still, my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) tried our best to inject some more sense into the debate, and can be satisfied with the submissions we produced (if not necessarily with the quality of attention they received from parliamentarians). I found myself listed as lead author for the QUT DMRC submission, and also contributed to the ADM+S text:

Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Zahra Stardust, Kate FitzGerald, Timothy Graham, Ashwin Nagappa, Jean Burgess, Dennis Alexander Leeftink, Samantha Vilkins, Ned Watt, Maria Ochoa Diaz, Aleesha Rodriguez, Kateryna Kasianenko, Kim Osman, Daniel Whelan-Shamy, Lucinda Nelson, Bernadette Hyland-Wood, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard, Michelle Riedlinger, and Michael Dezuanni. QUT DMRC Submission to the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society. Canberra: Parliament of Australia, 17 July 2024.

James Meese, Cesar Albarran-Torres, Kath Albury, Daniel Angus, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Nicholas Carah, Robbie Fordyce, Jake Goldenfein, Timothy Graham, Lauren Hayden, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Sílvia Ximena Montaña-Niño, Christopher O'Neill, Christine Parker, Zahra Stardust, Nicolas Suzor, and Kimberlee Weatherall. ADM+S Submission to the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society. Canberra: Parliament of Australia, 28 June 2024.

However, as we now know the Australian federal government and some of its state counterparts have chosen to push ahead with their utterly idiotic plans to (try to) implement a minimum age limit of 16 years for Australian social media users, when even the federal parliament’s Joint Select Committee explicitly withheld its endorsement for this policy thought bubble. Out of interest, I attended the legitimisation circus that the New South Wales and South Australian state governments orchestrated for this initiative, and experienced the manufacturing of the moral panic about kids and social media first-hand. I covered it in this article for Crikey (and subsequently Crikey also published some great investigative work exploring exactly how the two state governments manufactured this moral panic):

Axel Bruns. “Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media.” Crikey, 15 Oct. 2024.

And as further details about the proposed social media ban for young Australians emerged, I wrote an article for the Australian Academy of the Humanities with my great colleague Aleesha Rodriguez from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child on why such a ban is a fundamentally stupid and unworkable idea:

Axel Bruns and Aleesha Rodriguez. “An Age Ban on Social Media Is Unworkable – What Are the Alternatives?” Australian Academy of the Humanities, 4 Oct. 2024.

Finally, and very much in this context, then, here’s one more article which my colleagues and I published in the journal Media International Australia in 2024. It shifts the focus of disinformation research away from ‘bad actors’ on social media, and highlights the central role that mainstream political actors and journalists play in pushing and amplifying disinformation narratives. This, surely, was one of the defining features of 2024, and there’s no reason to think that 2025 will be any different. Happy new year everybody, I guess…

Stephen Harrington, Axel Bruns, Phoebe Matich, Daniel Angus, Edwards Hurcombe, and Nadia Alana Jude. “‘Big Lies’: Understanding the Role of Political Actors and Mainstream Journalists in the Spread of Disinformation.” Media International Australia, 2024. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X241291317.