QUT Digital Media Research Centre

I’ve mentioned some of these already in my previous update, but wanted to collect them together again in a single post too: over the past few weeks I’ve had a burst of podcast engagements on a range of topics relating to social media. Some of these are also in connection with the new podcast series Read Them Sideways that my colleagues Sam Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate FitzGerald in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have now kicked off – and you may want to subscribe to the whole series via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their RSS feed …

There’s rather a lot going on in Australian policy-making around social media, most of it thoroughly disconnected from evidence, scholarship, and sanity – and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on some of these developments in future posts, too. For the moment, though, here is an update on some ongoing work surrounding the renewed controversies about Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), a thoroughly misshapen piece of legislation which sought to force major digital media platforms to hand over some of their revenue to cross-subsidise struggling commercial news media operators.

The inherent flaws in this approach led to …

I’ve had the pleasure of being featured in the latest round of QUT research promo videos, discussing our QUT Digital Media Research Centre research into polarisation, partisanship, mis- and disinformation, and other topics, and including the work emerging from my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Also featured are my excellent DMRC colleagues Ehsan Dehghan and Kate O’Connor-Farfan, and if you look closely there’s also a plug for my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real?

I think this came out quite nicely:

And along with other research leaders around the university, I also appeared in our latest university-wide promotional video. Don’t …

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian …

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am …

In July 2021, I was exceptionally honoured to be awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship: a five-year, A$3.5 million research grant that represents the highest level of individual recognition by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Laureate Fellowships are exceedingly rare – no more than 17 are awarded each year, and they go very predominantly to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; indeed, as far as I can tell, mine was the first awarded to a researcher from the Media and Communication field in the 13 years of the scheme’s existence.

Most importantly, the Laureate Fellowship enables me to …