Social Media

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 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 …

And the second keynote at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by the great Crystal Abidin. She begins by introducing herself as an anthropologist of Internet cultures, building especially also on standpoint theory and triangulation as a methodological framework. Her work has focussed especially on longitudinal ethnographies of Internet celebrity and social media pop cultures; she is best known, of course, for her work on influencer ecologies and economies.

This addresses communities and culture, functions and sociality, and structures and politics; over its several iterations, this work has examined influencers as a job description and culture of practice, as a concept …

The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Venessa Paech and Jennifer Beckett, whose focus is on the re-decentralisation of online community governance in the wake of recent changes to online environments. Many creators and community managers are now starting ‘cozy’ communities online, away from the major platforms; this project seeks to understand how and why they are doing this.

To do this, we must first understand digital sociality: investigating how we socialise in online spaces, and what it means to be a genuine online community. Platforms, follower bases, and audiences are not communities by default …

The second speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ziying Meng, whose focus is on self-governance in creator cultures in western and Chinese contexts. There still are considerable differences between the US-dominated western and Chinese platform ecologies, in spite of the rise of TikTok as a global platform; this represents a kind of parallel universe of platforms, with differing governance frameworks.

Chinese platforms are governed by Chinese state policies, while US-based platforms operate under western capitalist conditions; nonetheless there is also a global creator culture, which must arrange itself with these parallel ecologies. Ziying engaged in cross-platform …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.

Our slides are below:

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 …

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 …

For my last conference of the year, I’ve made the short trip up to the Sunshine Coast to attend the AANZCA 2025 conference. I’ll present some work later today, but we start with a keynote by the great Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who begins by introducing the idea of boutique media, as a new form of small-scale news organisations that responds to the decline of mainstream news media.

Boutique media represent a form of post-industrial journalism: as existing news organisations lose revenue and market share, the industry itself is changing substantially; this creative destruction leads to a restructuring of every organisational aspect …