The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides:

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

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.

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.

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication: