In addition to the conference presentations I covered in my last post, the last few months have also seen a number of new publications from my team and me – including no less than three new articles in the great Media International Australia journal.
Just days from the end of the year, my colleagues Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and I finally published our analysis of the domestic and international audiences of Australian right-wing news channel Sky News Australia (no relation to Sky News in the UK and elsewhere) on Facebook during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the …
2025 is finally over, but other than as part of the liveblogs I haven't yet had a chance to round up our various presentations at conferences during the second half of the past year. We ended the year with the AANZCA conference on the Sunshine Coast, where I presented what was something of a labour of love: a look back on ten turbulent years of the #auspol hashtag on what used to be Twitter.
Through the efforts of a series of excellent data scientists in our QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) team (especially Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, Jane Tan …
Division and Delay in Australian Climate and Energy Discussions: An LLM-Assisted Analysis of Discourse Coalitions across News Reports and Parliamentary Submissions
Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Katharina Esau, Laura Vodden, Tariq Choucair, Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Ehsan Dehghan, and Samantha Vilkins
The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is again my QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, this time presenting our research into how generative AI chatbots respond to queries about conspiracy theories. We have already seen how engagement with such chatbots can create harm, and it is important to examine what safety guardrails are in place to prevent chatbots from supporting conspiracy theories.
We examined this by assuming the persona of a casually curious chatbot user, asking a series of questions related to various such conspiracy theories. These include historical stories such as the assassination of John F …
