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 …
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 …
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 …
The 2025 Australian federal election is in full swing, with just over one week to go before the 3 May 2025 election date. As in previous elections, my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have been following the social media campaign with particular interest, and have now published a mid-campaign update on the electioneering process as it's unfolded especially on Facebook and Instagram – our overview of current patterns and dynamics is now live on the DMRC Website.
Our work is made considerably more difficult, though, by the severe deterioration of data access to leading …
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:
