The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Ari Stillman, whose interest is in Reddit data analysis. Historically, Reddit has provided data on activities on the platform quite openly; its leaders had been strongly committed to open access and data sharing, but this changed substantially some 1.5 years ago when Reddit restricted its API, however.
This caused outrage in the user community, and especially amongst the unpaid community moderator workforce who relied substantially on API access to automate some aspects of their work. Following highly controversial debate, Reddit promised a Reddit 4 Researchers programme, yet this …
After a very lively roundtable on the Australian social media ban for young people at the AoIR 2025 conference, I’m now in a session on Reddit which features many of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues. We start with Dom Carlon, exploring the evolving trajectory of Reddit as a platform. What is the platform’s sense of identity, and how has this changed over its twenty-year history?
Reddit has shown remarkable staying power and has a unique position in the AI-infused Internet economy of today. It started in 2005 in pursuit of its mission to be ‘the front page of …
The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, presenting a study of pro-Bolsonaro narratives on Facebook in Brazil. The key question here is whether online hyperpartisan groups are as stable as they are thought to be; is that true, and how does such stability fare in times of intense political crisis?
Brazil is an obvious case for the study of such questions. The project tracked some 59 pro-Bolsonaro accounts between 2021 and 2023, a timeframe including Bolsonaro’s election loss against Lula and his subsequent coup attempt. The dataset contains some 12 million …
The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting a comprehensive review of the state of the art in the use of LLMs in content analysis research. This review focusses on the use of LLMs to analyse human-generated text, understood as a social phenomenon. This extends past reviews of computational text analysis methods that were published in previous years: the considerable growth in LLM use has made it necessary to return to the recent literature to examine how computational methodologies have evolved since then.
The next speaker in this panel at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Laura Vodden, presenting her work on exploring LLM-assisted frame analysis of news coverage. This focusses here especially on Australian climate activism news coverage. The first challenge here, of course, is to understand framing, which usually includes a problem definition, suggested causes, proposed solutions, blame attribution, and and addressee for the solution. Such framing frequently occurs in news reporting.
We start the first day of the AoIR 2025 conference proper with a panel on LLMs in research that involves several members of my QUT team. We start with a paper by Paul Pressmann, though, whose focus is on using LLMs in processing open-text responses from survey studies. The interest here is especially in questions of polarisation.
The data for this come from the POLTRACK project, which investigates the interrelations between individualised online information environments and polarisation. This combines Web tracking and surveys of some 2,000 participants. The survey component includes both closed- and open-ended questions that are used to …
It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …
After my stops in Brussels, Aarhus, Hamburg, and Bergen I'm now on the Brazilian leg of this conference journey, having already visited Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre for satellite symposia before the AoIR 2025 conference proper begins tomorrow. Here are some updates from those events, and slides for my presentations.
Researching Cross-Platform Campaigning in the 2025 Australian Federal Election
Axel Bruns, Samantha Vilkins, Katherine M. FitzGerald, Tariq Choucair, Daniel Angus, Caroline Gardam, Kunal Chand, Laura Vodden, Klaus Groebner, Katharina Esau, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, and Ehsan Dehghan
