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And the final speaker in this final paper session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor-Farfan, who focusses on the 2022 Australian federal election. She begins by noting the tensions between scale and depth in social media analysis: computational methods often privilege scale over depth, and there are now attempts to overcome this with the use of LLMs.

Her work draws on data from the two leading candidates’ – Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese – Facebook pages, from which she extracted the key narrative structures. An preliminary analysis of the key terms used by these political …

I presented the next paper at the AoIR 2025 conference, presenting the reflections of a large QUT team on how we might study election discussions across a wide range of social media platforms in the increasingly fragmented online platform environment. Here are our slides:

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Lion Wedel, which also focusses on the role of TikTok during the 2025 German election. The project here was conducted in collaboration with several public service and commercial media organisations in Germany, and sought to examine what political content TikTok users in Germany actually encountered during the election campaign.

This relied crucially on data donations from TikTok users: it asked these users to download their TikTok data packages and donate these to the research project for aggregate analysis. Such projects often struggle with high drop-out rates; instead of …

The next session at the AoIR 2025 conference is on online election debates, and starts with the great Felix Victor Münch, focussing on the 2025 German federal election. His focus here is especially on the role of TikTok during that election – how is this affecting electoral campaigning and public debate? TikTok itself has recently acted against some problematic practices during a range of elections, in fact.

There is some correlation, in fact, between TikTok engagement with Left Party posts and voting intention for the party over the final stages of the election campaign, but such patterns should not be …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Thales Rodrigues Antonelli, whose interest is in how climate issues are instrumentalised in parliamentarian debates, taking a very long-term perspective stretching over some 78 years. This requires a taxonomy of such claims, which also enables a connection of domestic debates in Brazil with broader debates around the world.

The key focus here is on the connection between land use and climate change. Land use changes – which for instance cause deforestation – are a key issue in Brazil; this also continues concerns that date back to the impacts …

The next speakers in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference are the great Marie Santini and Debora Gomes Saloes, whose focus is on anti-sustainability narratives in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The environmental agenda in Brazil is highly polarised especially also because of the power of the agribusiness sector; this sector has an interest in environmental deregulation because of its impacts on the environment. How do these actors support discussions in WhatsApp and Telegram groups in Brazil to spread anti-sustainability discourses, and what problematic content is spread in such platforms?

Marie’s Netlab has monitored such public groups on …

The third speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the dynamics of division and delay in Australian climate and energy discussions. Australia has had a long history of ‘climate wars’ over the appropriate climate policy; during the last election, the conservative opposition pushed for a nuclear energy initiative in part as a means to delay the transition towards renewable energies, for example.

Australians’ understanding of climate change and of the current energy mix is generally limited, and there is considerable opposition especially on the conservative side to net …

My own presentation on behalf of the Laureate team was next in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference, exploring a similar dataset on climate discussions on Facebook between 2018 and 2024 in Australia. Here are the slides:

The last day of the excellent AoIR 2025 conference in Rio de Janeiro starts with our panel on climate change communication in Australia and Brazil – two countries which have quite a few similarities in this context: they’re both highly exposed to extreme weather events, have stressed environments in the Amazon and Great Barrier Reef, and and are major fossil fuel exporters. We start with my excellent colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on the discussion of extreme climate events in social media environments.

Extreme weather experiences affect and are affected by individual perceptions and attitudes towards climate change. Individuals …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on visual political communication on Instagram during Brazil’s 2024 local elections. These took place two years after the deeply polarising presidential elections, and the subsequent Bolsonarist coup attempt; the focus of the present study is especially on how these elections unfolded in São Paulo with its population of nine million registered voters.

In preparation, the Brazilian Electoral Court had made arrangements with several major platform providers to safeguard the elections, and indeed this led one mayoral candidate to be suspended several …