I'm on the road again for a trip that will take me to the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno, SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg, and AoIR 2026 conference in Mexico City, with additional stops for research workshops and collaborations in Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin along the way. More on those (including conference liveblogging) as they happen, but in the meantime I also have some further updates on new publications that have just come out.
Starting with a big one: along with a large group of researchers from around the world, I've helped to author a perspective piece for Nature Communication on the state of research into polarisation, and that article is now out at long last. My contribution builds on the work of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team, of course, and especially on our exploration of destructive polarisation; for more on that concept we also have our article in Information, Communication & Society, of course. Fresh out of embargo, here's the Nature Communications article:
Max Falkenberg, Matteo Cinelli, Alessandro Galeazzi, Christopher Bail, Rosa Benito, Axel Bruns, Anatoliy Gruzd, David Lazer, Jae Lee, Jennifer McCoy, Kikuko Nagayoshi, David Rand, Antonio Scala, Alexandra Siegel, Sander van der Linden, Onur Varol, Ingmar Weber, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Fabiana Zollo, Andrea Baronchelli, and Walter Quattrociocchi. "Polarization across Borders and Disciplines: Challenges and Pathways for Integrated Research." Nature Communications (2 Sep. 2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76110-5.
Another important output from my team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre is a new article in a special issue of Network Science, which continues our work in developing and documenting the practice mapping approach which we first introduced in an article in Social Media + Society. In our new Network Science article, we take this approach further, and demonstrate its utility through an application to a dataset of public debate on Facebook about the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia. This also serves as the methodological groundwork for further research we're still engaged in, which will continue our in-depth thematic analysis of the Voice to Parliament debate on Facebook.
Importantly, prompted by the Network Science reviewers the appendix to this new article also explores the impact of different similarity thresholds and practice attribute combinations on the resultant practice mapping networks in this case. The outcomes of these comparisons support the default settings we had chosen for our case study in this article, and should also be instructive for other researchers exploring the practice mapping approach in their work. Many thanks especially to the special issue editors Luca Rossi and Matteo Magnani for their unwavering support for this article.
Axel Bruns, Katharina Esau, Kateryna Kasianenko, Ehsan Dehghan, Tariq dos Santos Choucair, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, and Donald Johannessen. "Beyond Interaction Networks: Practice Mapping as a Step towards the Detection of Destructive Polarization in Social Networks." Network Science 14 (2026): e20. https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2026.10040. (Supplementary materials: https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2026.10040.sm001.)
And speaking of Facebook, a little while ago my colleague Laura Vodden and I were also invited to contribute a brief piece to a special issue of Political Communication Report which addresses some of the challenges of platform data access on political communication in the post-API era. In our contribution to this collection we focus on the recent trend towards 'clean room' environments such as the Meta Content Library, which purport to provide safe and secure frameworks for working with platform data but in the process also severely curtail the kind of (independent, critical, public-interest) research that their users are actually able to do (and to publish). Here are our reflections on these challenges (and many thanks to editor Isabella de Sousa Gonçalves for the invitation!):
Axel Bruns and Laura Vodden. "The Challenges of Working with Platform Data from Clean Room Environments." Political Communication Report 33 (2026). https://doi.org/10.25358/openscience-15825.
Another spin-off from the practice mapping work is my contribution to a new article from our Australian Search Experience project in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), which has just come out in Media International Australia: while here we're dealing with data from search results on topics related to conspiracy theories, I was able to use an approach similar to the one we use in practice mapping to assess the similarity between search results sets for various conspiracist queries. Many thanks in particular to my colleague Kateryna Kasianenko for leading this article:
Kateryna Kasianenko, Caroline Gardam, Katherine M. FitzGerald, Ashwin Nagappa, Axel Bruns, Shir Weinbrand, Daniel Angus, Samantha Vilkins, and Abdul Karim Obeid. "Searching for the Truth? Search Engines and Their AI Affordances’ Responses to Conspiratorial Search Practices." Media International Australia (2026). https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X261481856.
And that's it for the moment – stay tuned for ECREA 2026 liveblogging (including from a preconference on social media and elections) commencing next Monday, and then the SEASON 2026 and AoIR 2026 conferences a little further down the track!
