The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

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:

My own presentation on behalf of the Laureate team was next in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference, exploring a similar dataset on climate discussions on Facebook between 2018 and 2024 in Australia. Here are the slides:

The last day of the excellent AoIR 2025 conference in Rio de Janeiro starts with our panel on climate change communication in Australia and Brazil – two countries which have quite a few similarities in this context: they’re both highly exposed to extreme weather events, have stressed environments in the Amazon and Great Barrier Reef, and and are major fossil fuel exporters. We start with my excellent colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on the discussion of extreme climate events in social media environments.

Extreme weather experiences affect and are affected by individual perceptions and attitudes towards climate change. Individuals …

The second presenter in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on the Bolsonarist coup attempt in Brazil on 8 January 2022. This occurred after Bolsonaro’s close election loss in November 2022, which Bolsonaro disputed and which led his supporters to call for military intervention. By now, Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for this coup attempt.

These events can be seen as a clear sign of deep-set destructive polarisation in Brazil: there is a breakdown of communication between the sides, an emotional exclusion of others, and a dismissal of information …

The final session today at the AoIR 2025 conference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, who begins by introducing the challenge of assessing polarisation: there are many different definitions of polarisation, which require different measures of assessment. Most current methods fail to sufficiently distinguish between these types of polarisation.

Tariq is therefore proposing a new approach to assessing polarisation, which he has applied to the study of national electoral contests in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Peru. The focus here is to identify polarising rhetoric, including campaign attacks, and polarisation in broader public debates.

The method focusses especially on …