And the lucky last speaker in the final session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library in Frankfurt is the excellent Giada Marino, whose interest is the operation of data access provisions under DSA Article 40.12. The focus here is on very large online marketplace platforms and the systemic risks they pose to minors.

Article 40.12 addresses access to publicly available data from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines; this is coordinated across EU jurisdictions by the Expert Group on Access to Publicly Available Data (ECAT). The present project focusses on marketplace platforms such as …

And the next speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Beatrice Cannelli, whose interest is in how national memory institutions’ social media archiving initiatives have been affected by changing data access regimes. Such activities are affected by national legal frameworks, available resources, collection policies and scope, technical limitations, and the Terms of Service of the various platforms.

The latter are justified by user privacy concerns and the protection of sensitive information, but in practice mostly protect the platforms’ own business interests. How these are formulated influences the extent to which content from such platforms …

The post-lunch session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with LK Seiling and Sophia Graf, who discuss the Weizenbaum-Institut’s DSA40 Collaboratory project. The EU’s Digital Services Act provides for research access to public and non-public data via its articles 40(12) and 40(4), and in both cases this is limited to research that investigates what is called ‘systemic risks’, and to Very Large Online Platforms which serve at least 10% of the EU population, which translates to 45 million users.

If platforms are found to have failed to provide such access, the EU can (and …

The second session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library begins with a paper by Mia Berg and Oliver Vettermann, whose focus is on social media data scraping, with a particular focus on TikTok. TikTok does offer an API for data access (at least in Europe), but unfortunately it remains severely limited and unreliable; this is problematic given that many user practices and content formats are in urgent need of further analysis. One example of such a content genre is AI-generated video content, such as POV videos that purport to imagine historical situations.

Manual data gathering …

The third presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ciaran Ryan, whose focus is on the populist 2022 Convoy to Canberra, which promoted anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its themes included moralised delegitimisation and affective responses.

This can be described as promoting destructive polarisation on COVID-19 themes: it dehumanised, demeaned, and insulted its opponents. Opponents were seen as existential threats, using hypermoralised language that positioned the contest as a battle between good and evil. This also means that legitimate concerns are ignored, and even in-group members who seek some degree of engagement and consensus …

And the final day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a session on transnational news that begins with Niusha Hansel and Linda Jean Kenix. Their study examines news coverage of the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to deport migrants. Some 600,000 undocumented immigrants have (supposedly) been deported during the first year of Trump’s second term, and a total of 2 million have left the US; this has also caused widespread protests, including the No Kings protests across the country.

How has this been reported internationally, across English-speaking countries UK, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Nigeria, and India? Common to these are …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Derek Wilding, with a reflection on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its attempts to regulate disinformation. Through the DSA, the EU has moved from a regime of platform self-regulation to co-regulation: this might be understood as a form of enforceable self-regulation, since it does not depend solely on industry players.

It contrasts with the Australian environment, where self-regulation by the members of the DIGI industry association remains the current model after the co-regulation model of the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill failed to make it through …

The post-lunch session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Tauel Harper, whose focus is especially on the role of public service media in combatting such problematic information. Disinformation is a serious threat to democracy in Australia and elsewhere, of course; its impact on the public sphere is deeply concerning, especially since the role of the public sphere is to regulate claims to truth.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relationship between trust in government and the efficacy of policy; this also points to the importance of meaning-making spaces to the …