The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’ve chosen is on the digital society, and begins with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and a paper on actionable research. Universities are under great political and financial pressure around the world at the moment, and this has led to an increased emphasis on knowledge transfer, open science, and public engagement for scholarly work, but such emphases are not well-aligned with internal reward structures in academia at this stage.

While society is understood to be deeply in need of our expertise, this enshrines a pattern where knowledge is produced within …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Stef Aupers, focussing on online conspiracy theories. These are not individual, but collectively shared, discussed, and shaped on social media. Existing research often focusses on platforms conspiracism, emphasising the role of technological features and platform affordances; what is much less frequently examined are the active and collective meaning-making practices through which groups of conspiracy theorists construct their online social identities.

This represents a participatory conspiracy culture which enables the social construction of identity; it performs boundary work through which conspiracist communities define and policy the …

The second presentation in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is by Ruth Garland, with a focus on disinformation and the people. How, in particular, can governments communicate effectively in an age of disinformation? What if governments themselves embrace the tools of disinformation for branding and propaganda via their social media channels?

Ruth’s focus here is especially on former UK Chancellor and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s personal branding strategies via official government social media accounts; this contradicts past conventions of impartiality, and takes place in an environment of increasingly partisan media outlets in the UK and …

For the first paper session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen I am in a session on disinformation and conspiracies, which starts with Marilia Gehrke and Eedan Amit-Danhi, whose focus is on gendered disinformation. Gendered disinformation includes manipulated images, using image editing and increasingly also generative AI; this often references sexuality and personal identity.

Much of the scholarship to date has tended to focus on gender or disinformation, but not on both together; it also tends to focus on intentionality, even though the harm that gendered disinformation produces does not depend on whether this content was shared with …

After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …

And the final speaker in this final paper session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor-Farfan, who focusses on the 2022 Australian federal election. She begins by noting the tensions between scale and depth in social media analysis: computational methods often privilege scale over depth, and there are now attempts to overcome this with the use of LLMs.

Her work draws on data from the two leading candidates’ – Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese – Facebook pages, from which she extracted the key narrative structures. An preliminary analysis of the key terms used by these political …

I presented the next paper at the AoIR 2025 conference, presenting the reflections of a large QUT team on how we might study election discussions across a wide range of social media platforms in the increasingly fragmented online platform environment. Here are our slides:

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Lion Wedel, which also focusses on the role of TikTok during the 2025 German election. The project here was conducted in collaboration with several public service and commercial media organisations in Germany, and sought to examine what political content TikTok users in Germany actually encountered during the election campaign.

This relied crucially on data donations from TikTok users: it asked these users to download their TikTok data packages and donate these to the research project for aggregate analysis. Such projects often struggle with high drop-out rates; instead of …

The next session at the AoIR 2025 conference is on online election debates, and starts with the great Felix Victor Münch, focussing on the 2025 German federal election. His focus here is especially on the role of TikTok during that election – how is this affecting electoral campaigning and public debate? TikTok itself has recently acted against some problematic practices during a range of elections, in fact.

There is some correlation, in fact, between TikTok engagement with Left Party posts and voting intention for the party over the final stages of the election campaign, but such patterns should not be …