Elections

The second speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Luke Heemsbergen and Fan Yang, whose focus is on disinformation as a vibe: there is increasing evidence that regulating and combatting disinformation by addressing their factuality is ineffective, since its central effect is to spread a general sense of distrust in government and other authoritative actors, and since disinformation spreaders tend to continue to share such content even in full knowledge that it is incorrect.

Australia still needs more critical disinformation research: this study in particular focusses on Chinese-speaking Australians who encountered disinformation on platforms such as WeChat …

The third speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Natasha van Antwerpen, whose focus is also on the 2025 Australian federal election. Her interest is in the role of mis- and disinformation during the election. This connects with overall concerns about the effects of mis- and disinformation on societal cohesion, trust in institutions, moral decline, antisocial and harmful behaviours, etc.

Her project examined what mis- and disinformation individuals encountered during the election campaign. This was done through an experience survey: participants installed an app on their phones that would regularly ask them to report on their experiences …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Edward Hurcombe, whose focus is also on news in the 2025 Australian federal election. News consumption is now increasingly fragmented, with a growing number of younger voters no longer engaging with mainstream, legacy media; influencers were therefore invited to the 2025 budget lockdown, and PM Anthony Albanese appeared on influencer Abbie Chatfield’s podcast.

How was the election covered across traditional and social media news outlets in Australia, then? How do they imagine their audiences? Data were gathered from ABC News, The Age, The Guardian, news.com.au, and …

I’ll present in the first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, but we start with Kevin Tan, whose focus is on digital media strategies and voter engagement during the 2025 elections in Singapore and Australia. There is continued strong investment in digital communication by political parties, but in Australia in 2025 record ad spending coincided with declining digital engagement; in Singapore, opposition parties enjoyed strong digital momentum but this did not translate into editorial success.

Online attention tells one story, then, but the ballot box tells quite another: online signals are not reliable predictors of election outcomes. What exactly …

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’m attending is on digital publics, and starts with Maria Grub and Antonia Wurm, focussing on Twitch as a platform for political discussion in Germany. Twitch, of course, is usually known as a gaming platform which enables people to livestream their gaming sessions while viewers communicate in real-time through a live chat. This can also be monetised, with streamers making money and gaining access to early game releases.

However, users also encounter political content on the platform, at least incidentally; this seems to especially favour right-wing content, and …

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:

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 …