The fourth speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jessica Kühn, whose focus is on adolescents’ egocentric networks on social media platforms. This draws on the qualitative network analysis method (QNA), which focusses on an individual’s network as an egocentric, personal network, and on the individual’s perceptions of that network as well as on the perceptions of their contacts.

This surfaces which network contacts matter to the central individual, how, and why, and helps us to analyse the embeddedness of individuals within their social environment. But it is a complex and work-intensive method – most …

The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.

Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …