After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

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 …

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.

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.