Government

The third presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ciaran Ryan, whose focus is on the populist 2022 Convoy to Canberra, which promoted anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its themes included moralised delegitimisation and affective responses.

This can be described as promoting destructive polarisation on COVID-19 themes: it dehumanised, demeaned, and insulted its opponents. Opponents were seen as existential threats, using hypermoralised language that positioned the contest as a battle between good and evil. This also means that legitimate concerns are ignored, and even in-group members who seek some degree of engagement and consensus …

And the final day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a session on transnational news that begins with Niusha Hansel and Linda Jean Kenix. Their study examines news coverage of the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to deport migrants. Some 600,000 undocumented immigrants have (supposedly) been deported during the first year of Trump’s second term, and a total of 2 million have left the US; this has also caused widespread protests, including the No Kings protests across the country.

How has this been reported internationally, across English-speaking countries UK, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Nigeria, and India? Common to these are …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Derek Wilding, with a reflection on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its attempts to regulate disinformation. Through the DSA, the EU has moved from a regime of platform self-regulation to co-regulation: this might be understood as a form of enforceable self-regulation, since it does not depend solely on industry players.

It contrasts with the Australian environment, where self-regulation by the members of the DIGI industry association remains the current model after the co-regulation model of the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill failed to make it through …

The post-lunch session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Tauel Harper, whose focus is especially on the role of public service media in combatting such problematic information. Disinformation is a serious threat to democracy in Australia and elsewhere, of course; its impact on the public sphere is deeply concerning, especially since the role of the public sphere is to regulate claims to truth.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relationship between trust in government and the efficacy of policy; this also points to the importance of meaning-making spaces to the …

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’ve chosen is on the digital society, and begins with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and a paper on actionable research. Universities are under great political and financial pressure around the world at the moment, and this has led to an increased emphasis on knowledge transfer, open science, and public engagement for scholarly work, but such emphases are not well-aligned with internal reward structures in academia at this stage.

While society is understood to be deeply in need of our expertise, this enshrines a pattern where knowledge is produced within …

The second presentation in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is by Ruth Garland, with a focus on disinformation and the people. How, in particular, can governments communicate effectively in an age of disinformation? What if governments themselves embrace the tools of disinformation for branding and propaganda via their social media channels?

Ruth’s focus here is especially on former UK Chancellor and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s personal branding strategies via official government social media accounts; this contradicts past conventions of impartiality, and takes place in an environment of increasingly partisan media outlets in the UK and …

After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …

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 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 …