The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

And the final speaker in this final paper session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor-Farfan, who focusses on the 2022 Australian federal election. She begins by noting the tensions between scale and depth in social media analysis: computational methods often privilege scale over depth, and there are now attempts to overcome this with the use of LLMs.

Her work draws on data from the two leading candidates’ – Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese – Facebook pages, from which she extracted the key narrative structures. An preliminary analysis of the key terms used by these political …

I presented the next paper at the AoIR 2025 conference, presenting the reflections of a large QUT team on how we might study election discussions across a wide range of social media platforms in the increasingly fragmented online platform environment. Here are our slides:

My own presentation on behalf of the Laureate team was next in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference, exploring a similar dataset on climate discussions on Facebook between 2018 and 2024 in Australia. Here are the slides: