As I write this I'm just about to head off to Germany for a keynote at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, followed by a three-month stay as a Mercator Fellow at the fabulous Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, thanks to the Communicative AI Research Unit. That stay will also enable me to visit a number of other colleagues and collaborators along the way, including at GESIS in Köln, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the University of Münster, the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, LMU München, and …

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable on "Margins in Motion: Platformization, Polarization, and the New Public Sphere", as part of the CORIT: Countering Online Radicalization and Incivility in Italy research project at the University of Urbino, led by the great Giovanni Boccia Artieri.

The full recording of the roundtable — which also involved Katarina Bader, Raquel Recuero, Eugenia Siapera, and Augusto Valeriani — should soon be available online (and I'll add the link to the video then), but I thought I'd also share the text of my opening statement here …

In addition to the conference presentations I covered in my last post, the last few months have also seen a number of new publications from my team and me – including no less than three new articles in the great Media International Australia journal.

Just days from the end of the year, my colleagues Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and I finally published our analysis of the domestic and international audiences of Australian right-wing news channel Sky News Australia (no relation to Sky News in the UK and elsewhere) on Facebook during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the …

2025 is finally over, but other than as part of the liveblogs I haven't yet had a chance to round up our various presentations at conferences during the second half of the past year. We ended the year with the AANZCA conference on the Sunshine Coast, where I presented what was something of a labour of love: a look back on ten turbulent years of the #auspol hashtag on what used to be Twitter. 

Through the efforts of a series of excellent data scientists in our QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) team (especially Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, Jane Tan …