And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on the study of political defectors’ communication practices. This is influenced by the gradual incursion of social media logics into politics, which has led to the rise of political influencers as well as of politicians-as-influencers, as well as to a decline in partisan allegiance.
Overall, this has led to increasing doubt about the costs and benefits of being part of a party machine, and manifested in a growing number of political defectors who see …
The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on tracking the ideological trajectories of Australian political influencers (with a later extension to German influencers as well). Here, the focus is on high-visibility political influencers for the period of 2016 to 2025.
Such changes in position might point to an erasure of complexities, which is also a symptom of destructive polarisation. By adjusting their positioning on various issues, influencers may increasingly form antagonistic camps, leading to greater and more profound polarisation. Political influencers …
The final panel for today at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City involves quite a number of colleagues from my team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, and we start with Vish Padinjar, whose focus is on trajectories of radicalisation on Reddit. This focusses especially on the GamerGate misogynistic harassment campaign in 2014, which snowballed into a broader Manosphere campaign of harassment targetting supposed ‘social justice warriors’.
Vish explores this through Reddit discussions from January 2014 to December 2016 across several gaming-related, toxic masculine, and feminist subreddits. What happened here is a form of radicalisation …
The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on evidence use in polarised climate reporting. Climate news is highly polarised, and this mirrors broader polarisation in the news landscape. However, such polarisation is not always a problem – agitation for progress is entirely legitimate, for instance, and diverging views are a natural part of healthy political debate. However, this can turn to destructive polarisation.
The analysis of news polarisation is often focussed on polarisation amongst news audiences; the assessment of news content for evidence of polarisation …
The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on polarisation around climate change, and starts with my colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. She begins by outlining recent developments in climate policy in Australia, and especially the discussions and disinformation about net zero policy, renewable energies, and the role of nuclear power in the energy mix.
Carly engaged in an LLM-assisted discourse analysis of submissions to the Australian federal parliament’s recent inquiry into nuclear power; she worked with the Claude LLM to code the submitters and their stances, the claims about nuclear and other energy sources being made, and the …
A few weeks ago some of my colleagues and I were invited to contribute to a collection of articles on 360info that discusses 'the age of anger': the rise of angry, polarised, uncompromising views in public debate. You can find the full collection on the 360info site.
For me, this was a useful prompt for an (occasionally angry) article that takes aim at a number of typical fallacies in public debate, from the nonsensical 'echo chamber' hypothesis to the 'anxious generation' claims that underpin Australia's (and now, other countries') disastrous attempts to ban young people from social media.
My own presentation, on behalf of a much larger team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, concluded the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno. For this, we set ourselves an ambitious task: first, given the increasing fragmentation of social media activity across a growing number of platforms, we wanted to explore how we might conduct a true cross-platform analysis of public discussions around the 2025 Australian election campaign, using data from platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.
Second, because this meant using the Meta Content Library for access to candidates' and …
The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on assessing polarisation amongst political leaders during election campaigns. The emphasis here is on affective, identity-based, and relational polarisation: the presentation of ‘us vs. them’ and sectarian in- and outgroup perspectives.
Computational methods might be valuable for this, but current methods do not fully capture this; they do not usually capture whom polarised language is directed against, and manual methods are commonly used instead. This paper develops this further, and applies this to a study …
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 …
