The final presentation in this ECREA 2022 session is by Daniel Thiele, whose focus is on right-wing populist communication. This is highly visible in social media spaces and in the comments sections of news sites, and may both harm democratic debate or revitalise political engagement. The concrete question tackled by this paper, then, is how such right-wing populist content is affecting the deliberative quality of comments on Facebook.

The third presentation in this ECREA 2022 session is by Uta Rußmann, and examined the Facebook pages of political parties in the 2019 European elections. It focusses especially on the visual practices of such pages. User engagement with such content can shape political discourse, as it affects the visibility of the content on Facebook due to the platform’s algorithmic logics; parties actively adjust their social media practices to generate such engagement, of course.

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Aarhus, and I’m at the ECREA pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, organised by the DigiWorld research network. Today, my QUT DMRC colleague Dan Angus and I presented our paper with Ehsan Dehghan, Nadia Jude, and Phoebe Matich on the use of social media during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. Here are the slides:

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even they might be aware are far removed from any objective truth.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.

On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this symposium. When we submitted the proposal for this paper, we’d assumed the election would have been well over by now, but as the Prime Minister opted for the latest possible election date in this legislative period, what we had to present was a preliminary overview of the social media campaigning and advertising patterns we’ve ben able to observe so far.

This is based on our ongoing weekly updates with the latest analysis of social media campaign developments, published through the DMRC research blog. Updates 1, 2, and 3 are online as I write this, and we’ll get started on the next post tomorrow – keep an eye on the DMRC blog.

But for now, here are our slides from the talk at Villa Collina, and the full paper abstract is also online:

Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.

On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk, available below, also gave me an opportunity to speak more generally about the continued challenges of researching social media platforms and their activities, and to outline some of the work that my colleagues and I in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are doing to address these issues. The audio on the recording is a little soft, but I hope the overall discussion comes through clearly enough; slides and further details are linked below.

Axel Bruns. “Facebook's Australian News Ban and Its Implications for Critical Platform Studies.” Invited presentation at the Griffith Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Brisbane, 26 Nov. 2021.

A few days later I gave a talk to the Social Media Data Science Group at the University of Sydney – many thanks to Monika Bednarek for the invitation. This was a great opportunity for me to step through a number of different, related concepts from groups through communities to publics, and organise some thoughts on how to distinguish these broadly similar but nonetheless distinct formations from one another. This is important especially in the context of network analysis, which all too often jumps to calling collections of similar entities a ‘community’ without paying sufficient attention to the specific meaning of that term: not every cluster is necessarily a community in the proper sense of the word.