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 social media platforms: following its enxittification under Elon Musk, the Twitter API is simply gone, and access to data from Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram is also far less straightforward since CrowdTangle was decommissioned. We've flagged these issues in a new piece for 360info: while we discuss these challenges here in the context of the Australian federal election, they apply much more broadly too.
Axel Bruns and Samantha Vilkins. “How Digital Giants Let Poll Scrutiny Fall.” 360info, 27 Feb. 2025.
In addition to this discussion of the methodological challenges, though, my Australian Laureate Fellowship team and I have also published another 360info article on the signs of destructive polarisation (described in the headline as 'toxic division') that voters should watch out for in the Australian election campaign (and elsewhere in politics).
Katharina Esau, Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair, Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard, Kate S. O’Connor-Farfan, and Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. “5 Signs of Toxic Division — and How to Beat Them.” 360info, 13 Mar. 2025.
There's a range of further election-related articles on the 360info site right now, including this excellent article on the weaponisation of transphobia in political campaigning. You can find many of them in the links of further reading at the bottom of these articles.
More Articles on Polarisation
Our election analysis also builds on our development of the concept of destructive polarisation, as published in Information, Communication & Society last year – translating the concept for a general public and offering some pointers to how to respond to it. The original article on the concept is available here:
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.
We've covered this and our overall understanding of polarisation in a new chapter for the Handbook of Social and Political Conflict, edited by Sergei Samoilenko and Solon Simmons, too:
Samantha Vilkins, Axel Bruns, Sebastian Svegaard, Tariq Choucair, and Katharina Esau. “Polarization.” In Sergei A. Samoilenko and Solon Simmons, eds., The Handbook of Social and Political Conflict. London: John Wiley & Sons, 2025. 17–29.
And finally, I was one of a long list of authors to contribute to this overview of the field and call for more truly global scholarship on polarisation, beyond the outsized attention paid to the unique and unrepresentative (basket) case of the United States:
Falkenberg, Max, Matteo Cinelli, Alessandro Galeazzi, Christopher A. Bail, Rosa M. Benito, Axel Bruns, Anatoliy Gruzd, David Lazer, Jae K. Lee, Jennifer McCoy, Kikuko Nagayoshi, David G. Rand, Antonio Scala, Alexandra Siegel, Sander van der Linden, Onur Varol, Ingmar Weber, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Fabiana Zollo, Andrea Baronchelli, and Walter Quattrociocchi. “Towards Global Equity in Political Polarization Research.” arXiv, 15 April 2025.
So much for this update from the election campaign – but there's a lot else happening at the moment, so more news soon!
