Practice Mapping

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 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 …

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 …

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: