AANZCA 2025

Ten Years of Uninterrupted Debate: The #auspol Hashtag Community, 2014-2023

Axel Bruns, Anand Badola

• 26 Nov. 2025 – Paper presented at the AANZCA 2025 conference, Sunshine Coast

Presentation Slides

Abstract

From the popular adoption of Twitter as a medium for public and political debate in Australia in the late 2000s to the transformation of the platform under Elon Musk, #auspol was the most consistently active hashtag in the Australian Twittersphere; versions of it persist even in the toxic environment of X, and on alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. At times derided as ‘electronic graffiti’ (by Tony Abbott), or misunderstood as a ‘ left-wing echo chamber’, the hashtag nonetheless attracted a large number of exceptionally committed participants, producing a vast volume of posts that tracked political events in Australia and the world over two particularly turbulent decades.

This paper examines #auspol not as the social media trace of exogenous political developments, but as a uniquely persistent communicative phenomenon in its own right: even on Twitter, the remarkable longevity of this hashtag and its core userbase was unusual. Hosting a central core of consistently engaged users – whom we may understand as ‘political junkies’ (Coleman, 2003), usually without formal political roles – surrounded by a broader group of less engaged participants, including politicians, journalists, activists, and other political stakeholders, and widely visible across the Australian and international Twittersphere as a result of retweeting and the trending topics algorithm, the hashtag became a cultural object in its own right.  

Drawing on a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of #auspol activity that covers the period from January 2014 to July 2023, this paper explores whether #auspol can be understood as a genuine community of participants in a cultural studies sense, and in doing so considers how we might distinguish a genuine hashtag community from a hashtag public. It documents the longevity of the community core, many of whom contributed on a nearly daily basis throughout most of the 10-year period studied here; however, stable community structures were also regularly disrupted by a new and often temporary influx of additional participants during the many political scandals, crises, elections, and other periods of heightened political attention and debate. Those new participants who remained active over the longer term were then often absorbed into the core community.

Tracing these developments over time and reflecting on #auspol’s legacy as a space predominantly for political discussion amongst ordinary users (with occasional contributions from journalists, politicians, and other professional political stakeholders), we suggest that #auspol deserves attention not – or not only – for its political content, but as an exceptionally successful online community.