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The past few months have been quite busy with conferences and events, so here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to recently. I’ll start here with a handful of videos from recent events – more on my recent and upcoming conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters in subsequent posts…

First, in May I was delighted to participate in a three-part series on “Future-Proofing the Public Sphere”, hosted by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance and the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, and the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, where I work, which featured separate public talks from my fellow Australian Laureate Fellow John Dryzek from the University of Canberra and me and then put us in conversation in a final event. While we’re coming from different fields, our perspectives on current issues were remarkably aligned, so this was a very fruitful exchange, and I’m very thankful to my Canberra colleagues for initiating this series of events. In the original order of presentations, here are the videos of our talks.

I began the series on 2 May 2023 with my talk “The Filter in Our (?) Heads: Digital Media and Polarisation”, outlining the overall motivations for and agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project:

Axel Bruns. “The Filter in Our (?) Heads: Digital Media and Polarisation.” First presentation in the Future-Proofing the Public Sphere series, Brisbane / Canberra, 2 May 2023.

One of the major components of my guest professorship at the University of Zürich in late 2022 was to develop and deliver a one-off undergraduate course on gatewatching and the continuing transformation of journalism as a result of the impact of social media, from the early days of blogs and citizen journalism to the present. This builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. I also took the opportunity to augment the book's contents with a handful of additional lectures on topics such as 'fake news', fact-checking, 'filter bubbles', and the power of social media platforms - topics that have emerged and grown in importance even further since the book was published.

The lectures were all recorded, and it would be a shame if the material went to waste after it's one-off presentation in Zürich. So, I'm pleased to say that after a little light editing, the 13 weekly lectures from this course are now online, and collected in a handy YouTube playlist. They're each running between 60 and 90 minutes in length, and the slides are also available separately (they're linked from the description of each video). I've listed the full syllabus of readings below.

I hope this is useful, and would love to see these lectures be used in teaching wherever they might suit – for instance in undergraduate journalism, media studies, or social media courses. Please share these materials with anyone who might be able to benefit from them.

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, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and German) in-house at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. My sincere thanks especially to my excellent colleague Sofya Glazunova for leading this project.

Sofya Glazunova, Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Souleymane Coulibaly, and Abdul K. Obeid. “Soft Power, Sharp Power? Exploring RT’s Dual Role in Russia’s Diplomatic Toolkit.” Information, Communication & Society, 21 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2155485.

Just a few days earlier, a new article about the social media amplification of articles in The Conversation that referred to preprint content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic also came out, in Media International Australia. But I have to stress that I only had limited involvement with this work – most of the heavy lifting was done by DMRC Visiting Scholar Alice Fleerackers (usually of Simon Fraser University) and my DMRC colleague Michelle Riedlinger.

Alice Fleerackers, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. “Academic Explanatory Journalism and Emerging COVID-19 Science: How Social Media Accounts Amplify The Conversation’s Preprint Coverage.” Media International Australia, 19 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221145022.

A few months ago my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals and I also published a new article in Media and Communication that explores how journalists have perceived and reacted to the challenge of ‘fake news’. This was based on Aljosha’s extensive interviews with newsworkers in Australia, the UK, and Germany, and provides some fascinating insights into the journalistic mindset in relation to this critical challenge.

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals.

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists.

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.