And the final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Nguyen Do Doan Hanh, whose focus is on reinterpreting masculinities through a Vietnamese virtual influencer. Virtual influencers are stylised social media figures existing across multiple social media platforms; they are artificially created and represent various agents.

Such figures have commercial potential, are aesthetically constructed, and navigate various environmental and ethical concerns about influencer culture; they are often hyper-feminised and embedded in patriarchal, cultural gender roles. In Vietnam, such roles are affected by a range of historical influences from Asian and western cultures.

Vietnamese virtual …

The final (!) session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on conspiracy theories, and starts with my great QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, presenting her work on the conspiratorial canon. Her focus on the knowledge production processes of conspiracy theorists, and ‘conspiracy theory’ here means an effort to explain events or practices by references to the supposed machinations of powerful people who work to conceal their role. Most people in the Anglosphere have been found to believe in at least one conspiracy theory.

How do conspiracy theorists create knowledge, then? There is a link here to concepts such as participatory disinformation …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, focussing especially on political advertising during the 2025 Australian federal election. This work is also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Computational advertising is ephemeral and targeted, individually personalised to the social media user; it is difficult to study these processes at scale. While platforms purport to provide some ad transparency libraries, these are limited, and can be enhanced through other approaches.

Some such approaches include data donations via browser plugins that capture the ads encountered by …

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

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 …