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Snurb — Tuesday 17 March 2026 23:54

Towards a Vocabulary for the On-Sharing of Research Data from Social Media Platforms

'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Access Days 2026 | Liveblog |

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Katharina Maubach, whose focus here is on data formats for archiving social media data. She works with a project exploring liking activities on social media platforms, especially relating to content from news sites; this covers Disqus, Facebook, YouTube, Xitter, and Instagram.

Ideally, such a cross-platform dataset should be shared with other researchers under FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), but under the Terms of Service of such platforms and their data access conditions this is very difficult; the focus of Katharina’s …

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Snurb — Tuesday 17 March 2026 22:41

AVERA: Building a Shared Dataset of Right-Wing Extremism Actors on Social Media Platforms

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Social Media Access Days 2026 | Liveblog |

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 …

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Snurb — Saturday 14 March 2026 12:26

New Work and Coming Attractions

Travel | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Publications |

As I write this I'm just about to head off to Germany for a keynote at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, followed by a three-month stay as a Mercator Fellow at the fabulous Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, thanks to the Communicative AI Research Unit. That stay will also enable me to visit a number of other colleagues and collaborators along the way, including at GESIS in Köln, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the University of Münster, the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, LMU München, and …

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Snurb — Sunday 8 February 2026 10:48

Revisiting 'the' Public Sphere, Again

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | ARC Future Fellowship | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | DMRCSS 2026 |

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 …

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Snurb — Sunday 8 February 2026 10:40

From 'the' Public Sphere to a Network of Publics: Rethinking Contemporary Public Communication Spaces (DMRCSS26)

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | DMRCSS 2026 |
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Snurb — Saturday 24 January 2026 14:17

Some Thoughts about Polarisation and Its Configurations

Politics | Government | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) |

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable on "Margins in Motion: Platformization, Polarization, and the New Public Sphere", as part of the CORIT: Countering Online Radicalization and Incivility in Italy research project at the University of Urbino, led by the great Giovanni Boccia Artieri.

The full recording of the roundtable — which also involved Katarina Bader, Raquel Recuero, Eugenia Siapera, and Augusto Valeriani — should soon be available online (and I'll add the link to the video then), but I thought I'd also share the text of my opening statement here …

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Snurb — Thursday 8 January 2026 16:00

Propaganda, Division, Polarisation: New Publications in Media International Australia and Elsewhere

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2024 | AoIR 2021 | ICA 2024 | Television |

In addition to the conference presentations I covered in my last post, the last few months have also seen a number of new publications from my team and me – including no less than three new articles in the great Media International Australia journal.

Just days from the end of the year, my colleagues Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and I finally published our analysis of the domestic and international audiences of Australian right-wing news channel Sky News Australia (no relation to Sky News in the UK and elsewhere) on Facebook during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the …

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Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 15:06

Wrapping Up The Last of My 2025 Conference Presentations

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | Search Engines | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | ARC Future Fellowship | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2025 | AoIR 2025 | IAMCR 2025 | SEASON 2025 | Music |

2025 is finally over, but other than as part of the liveblogs I haven't yet had a chance to round up our various presentations at conferences during the second half of the past year. We ended the year with the AANZCA conference on the Sunshine Coast, where I presented what was something of a labour of love: a look back on ten turbulent years of the #auspol hashtag on what used to be Twitter. 

Through the efforts of a series of excellent data scientists in our QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) team (especially Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, Jane Tan …

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Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 14:22

Ten Years of Uninterrupted Debate: The #auspol Hashtag Community, 2014-2023 (AANZCA 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2025 |

AANZCA 2025

Ten Years of Uninterrupted Debate: The #auspol Hashtag Community, 2014-2023

Axel Bruns, Anand Badola

  • 26 Nov. 2025 – Paper presented at the AANZCA 2025 conference, Sunshine Coast

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 13:19

Mapping Fandom Ruptures: A Case Study of Taylor Swift Fandom Practices on Reddit (AoIR 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AoIR 2025 | Music |

AoIR 2025

Mapping Fandom Ruptures: A Case Study of Taylor Swift Fandom Practices on Reddit

Samantha Vilkins, Axel Bruns, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard

  • 16 Oct. 2025 – Paper presented at the 2025 Association of Internet Researchers conference, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro

Presentation Slides

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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