The next day at the the AoIR 2025 conference starts for me with a panel on AI imaginaries that begins with a paper by Giuliana Frascaria, whose interest is in cyborg imaginaries of the form that have been promoted by people like Mark Zuckerberg for some time. She has previously reviewed the literature and studied public attitudes towards these technologies, but this is limited by the fact that so few of these technologies already exist in the wild; this means that four the most part they remain futuristic imaginaries.

There are only some transhumanist pioneer communities that are early adopters …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, presenting a study of pro-Bolsonaro narratives on Facebook in Brazil. The key question here is whether online hyperpartisan groups are as stable as they are thought to be; is that true, and how does such stability fare in times of intense political crisis?

Brazil is an obvious case for the study of such questions. The project tracked some 59 pro-Bolsonaro accounts between 2021 and 2023, a timeframe including Bolsonaro’s election loss against Lula and his subsequent coup attempt. The dataset contains some 12 million …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting a comprehensive review of the state of the art in the use of LLMs in content analysis research. This review focusses on the use of LLMs to analyse human-generated text, understood as a social phenomenon. This extends past reviews of computational text analysis methods that were published in previous years: the considerable growth in LLM use has made it necessary to return to the recent literature to examine how computational methodologies have evolved since then.

Past methods have enabled the analysis of …

The next speaker in this panel at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Laura Vodden, presenting her work on exploring LLM-assisted frame analysis of news coverage. This focusses here especially on Australian climate activism news coverage. The first challenge here, of course, is to understand framing, which usually includes a problem definition, suggested causes, proposed solutions, blame attribution, and and addressee for the solution. Such framing frequently occurs in news reporting.

Laura’s slides are here:

Frame analysis is a difficult and labour-intensive task, however; it requires critical engagement with complex material, and human coding is …

We start the first day of the AoIR 2025 conference proper with a panel on LLMs in research that involves several members of my QUT team. We start with a paper by Paul Pressmann, though, whose focus is on using LLMs in processing open-text responses from survey studies. The interest here is especially in questions of polarisation.

The data for this come from the POLTRACK project, which investigates the interrelations between individualised online information environments and polarisation. This combines Web tracking and surveys of some 2,000 participants. The survey component includes both closed- and open-ended questions that are used to …

It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …

And the final speaker at the SEASON 2025 conference, very fittingly, is our host Dirk Lewandowski, presenting findings from a study commissioned by the German State Media Authorities that focussed on the transformation of online search by the introduction of artificial intelligence technologies. This is of course still in progress, so no definitive results should be expected yet. The study was conducted in May 2025, and results will be published in mid-October.

But we can already reflect on whether the introduction of AI represents a revolutionary transformation, or merely an incremental change; and on how AI-enhanced search affects the economic …

My own paper starts the final session at the the SEASON 2025 conference, presenting the Australian Search Experience team’s work towards assessing the effect of search query formulation on the diversity of search results, within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Here are the slides: 

Day two of the SEASON 2025 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by Anne Beaulieu, reflecting on the purpose and future of search. Search is now transforming considerably, especially given the intrusion of generative AI into the contiguous mix of uses for search, the impact of disinformation, the receding of the public sphere, and the impossibility of opting out from these systems; there is an urgent need to respond to this by rethinking search.

The way that students now engage with search engines and generative AI tools, for instance, reveals some of these changes and points to many of …