I was the next speaker in this panel at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of the COP26 and COP27 summits through our practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:
The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting our reflections on the experience of doing research using the Meta Content Library clean-room environment (and we have just published a new article in Political Communication Report on the clean-room model as well).
The MCL is Meta’s core access model for data from Meta platforms; it replaced the previous platform CrowdTangle in 2024, similarly offering a Web interface and API but transitioning to a clean-room environment within which all serious data work is meant to be conducted. Access …
I’m starting off the next session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit on behalf of my team. Slides are below:
After the conference is before the conference: after attending and blogging the ICA 2026 conference in Cape Town, I will be in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference next week, where I'll present a couple of papers and participate in a roundtable exploring our experiences with the Meta Content Library to date. More on those soon.
But ahead of that conference, I also have some major publication updates. Most importantly, I'm very pleased that the second edition of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics has now been published. The first edition came out in 2016 …
I was the next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, presenting our study exploring how various communicative AI chatbots respond to a range of old and new conspiracy theories. This has also already come out as an article in Media and Communication:
My twelve weeks as a Mercator Fellow at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) in Bremen are almost over already: I'll soon travel to Cape Town for the annual International Communication Association conference (more on this soon). I've had a great time here, and met some wonderful colleagues; the time has passed all too quickly.
My time in Bremen started with a presentation in the ComAI Lecture series at the Bremen Press Club, and I'm pleased to report that the video of the talk is now also available on the ZeMKI YouTube channel. The channel also has many …
A couple of months ago, I presented a critique of the concept of 'the' public sphere at the 2026 Digital Media Research Centre Summer School in Brisbane. Like the other talks in that segment of the Summer School programme, the team producing our DMRC podcast Read Them Sideways has now also published a recording of that talk for your listening pleasure, so here it is:
I think the podcast works fine by itself; since some of the presentation was fairly visual, though, if you'd like to flick through the slides while you listen I've embedded them below as well. And …
There will be a handful of side trips to other colleagues across Europe from here as well, though; in fact, I’ll begin the coming week with two days at GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, in Cologne, where I’ll also give a public lecture on our practice mapping approach as …
