Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Polarisation

Snurb — Thursday 8 January 2026 16:00

Propaganda, Division, Polarisation: New Publications in Media International Australia and Elsewhere

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2024 | AoIR 2021 | ICA 2024 | Television |

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 …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Sunday 4 January 2026 10:01

Facts and Fabrication in Search Experience: Russia’s War on Ukraine and Google's Role in Gatekeeping Fact-Checked Information (JERAA 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Artificial Intelligence | Search Engines | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | JERAA 2025 |

JERAA 2025

Facts and Fabrication in Search Experience: Russia’s War on Ukraine and Google's Role in Gatekeeping Fact-Checked Information

Kateryna Kasianenko, Ashwin Nagappa, Silvia Montaña-Niño, Michelle Riedlinger, Ned Watt, Anand Badola, Axel Bruns, and Daniel Angus

  • 2 Dec. 2025 – Paper presented at the JERAA 2025 conference, Brisbane

Presentation Slides

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 3 January 2026 13:12

Searching for the Truth? Search Engine Responses to Conspiratorial Search Practices (AANZCA 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Artificial Intelligence | Search Engines | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | AANZCA 2025 |

AANZCA 2025

Searching for the Truth? Search Engine Responses to Conspiratorial Search Practices 

Kateryna Kasianenko, Caroline Gardam, Katherine M. FitzGerald, Ashwin Nagappa, Daniel Angus, Shir Weinbrand, Samantha Vilkins, Axel Bruns, Abdul Karim Obeid

  • 26 Nov. 2025 – Paper presented at the AANZCA 2025 conference, Sunshine Coast

Presentation Slides

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 15:06

Wrapping Up The Last of My 2025 Conference Presentations

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | Search Engines | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | ARC Future Fellowship | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2025 | AoIR 2025 | IAMCR 2025 | SEASON 2025 | Music |

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 …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 14:22

Ten Years of Uninterrupted Debate: The #auspol Hashtag Community, 2014-2023 (AANZCA 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2025 |

AANZCA 2025

Ten Years of Uninterrupted Debate: The #auspol Hashtag Community, 2014-2023

Axel Bruns, Anand Badola

  • 26 Nov. 2025 – Paper presented at the AANZCA 2025 conference, Sunshine Coast

Presentation Slides

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 14:00

Extending Our Capabilities: Towards LLM-Assisted Frame Analysis of Australian Climate Movement News Coverage (AoIR 2025)

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Artificial Intelligence | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AoIR 2025 |

AoIR 2025

Extending Our Capabilities: Towards LLM-Assisted Frame Analysis of Australian Climate Movement News Coverage

Laura Vodden, Katharina Esau, Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair

  • 16 Oct. 2025 – Paper presented at the 2025 Association of Internet Researchers conference, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro

Presentation Slides

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 13:37

Division and Delay in Australian Climate and Energy Discussions: An LLM-Assisted Analysis of Discourse Coalitions across News Reports and Parliamentary Submissions (AoIR 2025)

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Practice Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AoIR 2025 |

AoIR 2025

Division and Delay in Australian Climate and Energy Discussions: An LLM-Assisted Analysis of Discourse Coalitions across News Reports and Parliamentary Submissions

Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Katharina Esau, Laura Vodden, Tariq Choucair, Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Ehsan Dehghan, and Samantha Vilkins

    » continue reading...
    Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 13:19

    Mapping Fandom Ruptures: A Case Study of Taylor Swift Fandom Practices on Reddit (AoIR 2025)

    Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AoIR 2025 | Music |

    AoIR 2025

    Mapping Fandom Ruptures: A Case Study of Taylor Swift Fandom Practices on Reddit

    Samantha Vilkins, Axel Bruns, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard

    • 16 Oct. 2025 – Paper presented at the 2025 Association of Internet Researchers conference, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro

    Presentation Slides

    » continue reading...
    Snurb — Thursday 1 January 2026 12:53

    How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping (IAMCR 2025)

    Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2025 |

    IAMCR 2025

    How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping

    Axel Bruns, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Tariq Choucair, Laura Vodden, and Ehsan Dehghan

    • 14 July 2025 – Paper presented at the IAMCR 2025 conference, Singapore

    Presentation Slides

    » continue reading...
    Snurb — Friday 28 November 2025 14:35

    Understanding the Contradictory Multiverse of Conspiracist Ideation

    Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | AANZCA 2025 | Liveblog |

    The fourth speaker in this session the AANZCA 2025 conference is Milica Stilinovic, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories, and especially on how people are drawn from more mundane spaces into far-right conspiracist ideation. This is often described as falling down the rabbit-hole, but the linear descent into alternative thinking that this image describes is not an accurate description of contemporary dynamics. Instead, there are any number of conspiracy theories available for users to explore, from which they may pick and choose their own worldviews.

    This may involve drawing a demarcation line between those theories that users are willing …

    » continue reading...

    Pagination

    • 1
    • Next page
    Polarisation
    INFORMATION
    BLOG
    RESEARCH
    PUBLICATIONS
    PRESENTATIONS
    PRESS
    CREATIVE

    Recent Work

    Presentations and Talks

    Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

    » more

    Books, Papers, Articles

    Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

    » more

    Opinion and Press

    Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

    » more

    Creative Work

    Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

    » more

    Lecture Series


    Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

    Bluesky profile

    Mastodon profile

    Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

    Google Scholar profile

    Mixcloud profile

    [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

    Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.