Social Media Network Mapping

Here’s the next instalment of my blog posts as I continue to work through my backlog of research updates – it’s been a big year, and it looks like there will be a fair few further posts to come. In this one I’ll focus on the European Communication Conference (ECREA), which was held online in September this year.

My own major contribution was another paper on the myth of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, reviewing the evidence and debunking the simplistic claims about the damaging effects that these phenomena are supposed to have. Here’s a video of the presentation, and more details are at the link below.

Axel Bruns. “Beyond the Bubble: A Critical Review of the Evidence for Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles.” Paper presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA) conference, online, 7 Sep. 2021.

I’ve expanded on this discussion in a new book chapter in the excellent new collection Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society, edited by Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo – many thanks to them both for the invitation to contribute a chapter. This provides a condensed version of the argument against ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and instead encourages us to look for the other, social and societal rather than technological factors driving hyperpartisanship and polarisation. (I’ll have more to say on the research agenda required to do so in a future post.) Here’s the book chapter as a pre-print, and the full book is now also available:

Oh dear – it’s been quite a while since I last found the time to update this site with some of my recent presentations and publications. And there’s quite a lot of news, so here’s the first instalment in what’s going to be a series of posts. Working through the last few months chronologically, let’s begin with the conferences of the International Communication Association and Australia New Zealand Communication Association, held (online) in May and July 2021, where my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I presented a number of papers on our current research.

At ICA 2021, I was involved in two presentations. First, with our visiting scholars Magdalena Wischnewski (from the University of Duisburg-Essen’s RISE_SMA research project) and Tobias Keller, I worked on a study of newssharing practices by followers of the far-right conspiracy site InfoWars on Twitter; as I’ve noted in a previous update, that study was also published in the journal Digital Journalism.

Magdalena Wischnewski, Axel Bruns, and Tobias Keller. “Shareworthiness and Motivated Reasoning in Hyper-Partisan News Sharing Behavior on Twitter.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association conference, online, 27-31 May 2021.

Second, with my colleagues Eddy Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington from my current ARC Discovery project Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation I also presented an update on our study of the dissemination of the baseless COVID-19/5G conspiracy theory on social, fringe, and mainstream media, focussing here especially on the fringe and media coverage of this content. I’ll have quite a few more updates on this in further updates, so for now I'll simply include the video – slides and other details at the link below: