The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on evidence use in polarised climate reporting. Climate news is highly polarised, and this mirrors broader polarisation in the news landscape. However, such polarisation is not always a problem – agitation for progress is entirely legitimate, for instance, and diverging views are a natural part of healthy political debate. However, this can turn to destructive polarisation.
The analysis of news polarisation is often focussed on polarisation amongst news audiences; the assessment of news content for evidence of polarisation …
The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on polarisation around climate change, and starts with my colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. She begins by outlining recent developments in climate policy in Australia, and especially the discussions and disinformation about net zero policy, renewable energies, and the role of nuclear power in the energy mix.
Carly engaged in an LLM-assisted discourse analysis of submissions to the Australian federal parliament’s recent inquiry into nuclear power; she worked with the Claude LLM to code the submitters and their stances, the claims about nuclear and other energy sources being made, and the …
A few weeks ago some of my colleagues and I were invited to contribute to a collection of articles on 360info that discusses 'the age of anger': the rise of angry, polarised, uncompromising views in public debate. You can find the full collection on the 360info site.
For me, this was a useful prompt for an (occasionally angry) article that takes aim at a number of typical fallacies in public debate, from the nonsensical 'echo chamber' hypothesis to the 'anxious generation' claims that underpin Australia's (and now, other countries') disastrous attempts to ban young people from social media.
My own presentation, on behalf of a much larger team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, concluded the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno. For this, we set ourselves an ambitious task: first, given the increasing fragmentation of social media activity across a growing number of platforms, we wanted to explore how we might conduct a true cross-platform analysis of public discussions around the 2025 Australian election campaign, using data from platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.
Second, because this meant using the Meta Content Library for access to candidates' and …
The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on assessing polarisation amongst political leaders during election campaigns. The emphasis here is on affective, identity-based, and relational polarisation: the presentation of ‘us vs. them’ and sectarian in- and outgroup perspectives.
Computational methods might be valuable for this, but current methods do not fully capture this; they do not usually capture whom polarised language is directed against, and manual methods are commonly used instead. This paper develops this further, and applies this to a study …
I'm on the road again for a trip that will take me to the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno, SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg, and AoIR 2026 conference in Mexico City, with additional stops for research workshops and collaborations in Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin along the way. More on those (including conference liveblogging) as they happen, but in the meantime I also have some further updates on new publications that have just come out.
Starting with a big one: along with a large group of researchers from around the world, I've helped to author a perspective piece for Nature Communication …
I was the next speaker in this panel at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of the COP26 and COP27 summits through our practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:
The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting our reflections on the experience of doing research using the Meta Content Library clean-room environment (and we have just published a new article in Political Communication Report on the clean-room model as well).
The MCL is Meta’s core access model for data from Meta platforms; it replaced the previous platform CrowdTangle in 2024, similarly offering a Web interface and API but transitioning to a clean-room environment within which all serious data work is meant to be conducted. Access …
I’m starting off the next session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit on behalf of my team. Slides are below:
After the conference is before the conference: after attending and blogging the ICA 2026 conference in Cape Town, I will be in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference next week, where I'll present a couple of papers and participate in a roundtable exploring our experiences with the Meta Content Library to date. More on those soon.
But ahead of that conference, I also have some major publication updates. Most importantly, I'm very pleased that the second edition of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics has now been published. The first edition came out in 2016 …
