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Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship)

ARC Laureate Fellowship, 2022-26

Snurb — Tuesday 15 July 2025 17:11

Exploring the Use of LLMs in News Content Coding

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Artificial Intelligence | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting on the methodology of our ongoing analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media. This explores patterns of polarisation within journalistic content, but polarisation is not particularly well-defined in the literature, so we have developed the concept of destructive polarisation as an approach to defining when polarisation becomes problematic.

There is no clear information on how polarised the Australian media landscape is. Therefore, this project examines climate change coverage across some 26 Australian news outlets from the mainstream to the …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 19:02

Reviewing the Diverging Definitions of Populism in Scholarly Research

Politics | Polarisation | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my great QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting progress findings from a large literature review on populism. We have previously observed how poorly defined the concept of polarisation is in the literature; there are many forms of polarisation that scholars have identified, but hardly and overarching perspectives.

This project took a similar approach to the concept of populism, which turns out to be better defined; dominant in this is Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin ideology that highlights divisions between ‘us’ …

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Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 18:50

Using Practice Mapping to Study Climate Debates on Facebook

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

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.

How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Sunday 13 July 2025 15:19

How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping (IAMCR 2025)

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 |
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Snurb — Sunday 13 July 2025 15:03

‘Just Asking Questions’: Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots (IAMCR 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | IAMCR 2025 |
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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 20:22

Introducing Practice Mapping as a Means to Assess Destructive Polarisation

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Liveblog |

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.

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Thursday 12 June 2025 02:03

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach (BBB 2025)

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Bots Building Bridges 2025 |

BBB 2025

Detecting the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation: The Practice Mapping Approach

Axel Bruns

  • 12 June 2025 – Bots Building Bridges workshop, Bielefeld

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Thursday 5 June 2025 22:31

Towards a Dynamic Practice Mapping of Climate Change Discourse on Facebook

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 | Liveblog |

I was next at the Weizenbaum Conference, presenting on our efforts to develop a dynamic practice mapping of climate change debates in Australia. Here are the slides, and for more information on the practice mapping approach see my recent post introducing the approach, and our first article in Social Media + Society about it…

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Snurb — Saturday 31 May 2025 12:33

Introducing Practice Mapping, at Home and Abroad

Politics | Polarisation | Travel | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ACSPRI 2024 | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

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 …

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Snurb — Friday 25 April 2025 14:32

Some Updates from the 2025 Australian Federal Election Campaign (and More Articles on Polarisation)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) |

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 …

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Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship)
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Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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