And the next session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with Ofra Klein, who will outline the challenges of studying far-right mobilisation in spite of the constraints of social media data access regimes. The far right use social media very extensively to promote their propaganda, and this can lead to physical demonstrations, riots, and violence; as and when this happens, social media posts and accounts are then often removed by the perpetrators of the platforms, complicating any meaningful research.

In addition, the number of platforms used for far-right agitation have diversified substantially; in addition …

It’s a chilly Tuesday in Frankfurt, the Matildas just advanced to the final of the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup, and I’m at the opening of the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, co-organised by my dear friend Katrin Weller from GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. The programme begins with a day in German, and opens with a paper by Pascal Siegers, who introduces the AVERA project. This emerged from a federal ministry project supporting the collection and sharing of data from research projects on racism and far-right extremism, and a first need it …

It's mid-February already, which means that here at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre we've just concluded another very engaging DMRC Summer School, with participants from around the world – many thanks to everyone who joined us for this.

One of the new segments in the programme this year was a session on 'Re-Thinking Media for the Platform Age', with several contributions from DMRC research leaders on current topics of interest. In my own talk for this, I revisited the idea of the public sphere once again, continuing a thought process that spans from my Information Policy article in …