I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.
I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.
The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …
The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Zeyu Zhu, whose interest is in global communication on Twitter between 2012 and 2022. We lack a systematic empirical description of global communication over this decade, which saw a rise of the Global South as documented in politics and economics, but is less well documented communication research.
This project works with a dataset drawn from the 1% real-time Twitter sample as available from the Internet archive; accounts captured in this dataset were geolocated based on their profiles using the Nominatim software; and retweet actions were then …
The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Ivan Paganotti, whose interest is in Brazil’s suspension of Xitter in August to October 2024 as a result of its non-compliance with Brazilian court rulings on media regulation. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court has been quite active in the field of media regulation, and its suspension of Xitter has set a precedent that may also be of relevance to other jurisdictions.
Xitter had been found to be non-compliant with Brazilian court rulings on blocking and removing the profiles of far-right influencers who were undermining its democratic …
The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.
This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …
The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.
Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …
The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.
Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …
It’s a Wednesday in Germany, and I’m in Bielefeld for a workshop of the Bots Building Bridges (3B) project. We start with an overview of the project’s activities to date, with Florian Muhle, Ole Pütz, Rob Ackland, and Matthias Orlikowski. The project focusses on online political discourse, and the dysfunctions in such discourse that are apparent in social media environments. This also addresses the questions of ‘echo chambers’, of polarisation, and of impacts on democratic discourse. Social media are not solely to blame for this: it may also be possible to support productive political discourse through social media, given the …
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:
