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Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 17:06

Portuguese Parties’ Facebook Posting about Climate Change

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

I’m a little late to the post-lunch session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, which has started with Ana Margarida Barreto’s paper on discussions of climate change on eleven Portuguese parties’ Facebook pages. They investigated the presence of various climate change-related topics on those pages.

Two broadly green parties talked about climate change considerably more than any of the others; though during the election all other parties also talk somewhat more about climate change. Most parties share a substantial number of images and videos, though the far-right populist Chega party exclusively shared links and no audiovisual content.

Minor and …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 18:50

Using Practice Mapping to Study Climate Debates on Facebook

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.

How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Sunday 13 July 2025 15:19

How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping (IAMCR 2025)

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 |
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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 20:22

Introducing Practice Mapping as a Means to Assess Destructive Polarisation

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Liveblog |

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 02:03

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach (BBB 2025)

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Bots Building Bridges 2025 |

BBB 2025

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach

Axel Bruns

  • 12 June 2025 – Bots Building Bridges workshop, Bielefeld

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Thursday 5 June 2025 22:31

Towards a Dynamic Practice Mapping of Climate Change Discourse on Facebook

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 | Liveblog |

I was next at the Weizenbaum Conference, presenting on our efforts to develop a dynamic practice mapping of climate change debates in Australia. Here are the slides, and for more information on the practice mapping approach see my recent post introducing the approach, and our first article in Social Media + Society about it…

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Snurb — Thursday 5 June 2025 22:28

Patterns in Social Media Discussions about the German Far Right’s ‘Remigration’ Plans

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 | Liveblog |

The second speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Julian Maitra, whose focus is on the German far-right’s plans for ‘remigration’: the forced expulsion of legal migrants from Germany. Notably, that term is now also used by the Trump administration as it plans its own mass deportations of residents from the US.

Ideas surrounding such remigration rhetoric connect affective publics and affective polarisation with cumulative racism, platforms racism, and digital populism. Julian explored these debates by gathering public social media posts from Facebook and Instagram on this concept, and is interested how they evolved over time. There were …

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Snurb — Thursday 5 June 2025 05:00

Shifting Discursive Alliances: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

WI 2025

Shifting Discursive Alliances: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping

Axel Bruns, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Tariq Choucair, Laura Vodden, and Ehsan Dehghan

  • 5 June 2025 – WI 2025 conference, Berlin

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Wednesday 4 June 2025 21:51

Patterns in Social Media Ad Targeting in the 2024 US Presidential Election

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Facebook | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with Mona Krewel, whose interest is in (micro-)targeted advertising in elections; she explores this here especially in the context of the 2024 US presidential election. All parties use such advertising, and tend to target voters whom they assume are ideologically close to them; our understanding of how this works is limited, however, and based largely on self-reporting from campaign managers (which is not necessarily reliable).

A different approach to this is via the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, which is problematic for other reasons; the present project explored the targeting strategies of some …

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Snurb — Saturday 31 May 2025 12:33

Introducing Practice Mapping, at Home and Abroad

Politics | Polarisation | Travel | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ACSPRI 2024 | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

I'm about to head off on a brief trip to Germany for a series of conferences and presentations, so this seems like a good moment for another update on recent developments. First off, I'm delighted to finally have a first publication out in the great Social Media + Society journal that introduces our new methodological approach of practice mapping. I've teased this in a few past posts and presentations already, not least in my keynote at the ACSPRI conference in November 2024, but together with my great QUT colleagues Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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