The final speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library today is Kristina Petzold, whose focus is on the question of whether music-related user-generated content can be seen as cultural heritage – this includes, for instance, some of the creative content generated and shared during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is part of post-digital everyday practice.
This includes content remixes, memes, and mashups, and is therefore highly referential; it is culturally relevant (and the cultural relevance of remix practices is now formally recognised under German law); but it is also highly ephemeral, especially where it exists in …
The next speakers in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library are Gabriel Viehhauser and Carl Friedrich Haak, whose interest is in making use of donated social media data – the concrete context here is that the Austrian author Clemens J. Setz, who has at times posted some of his short-form work on Twitter, has donated his archive of tweets to a library in Vienna, which was unsure about what to do with this gift.
Such work is diverse in its formats; further, Setz is author, but also interlocutor, curator, recipient, object of mentions …
The next speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Catharina Ochsner, whose focus is on the archiving of scholarly blogs. Such blogs are engaged in science communication and thereby introduce more transparency into the scientific process; they exist in many different formats and across various major and minor platforms, and frequently link to each other and to other external resources.
But their long-term availability is limited, and depends on the blogger’s continued activity. There is a need for long-term archival of such resources in their original form, which also implies a …
The second session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library begins with a paper by Mia Berg and Oliver Vettermann, whose focus is on social media data scraping, with a particular focus on TikTok. TikTok does offer an API for data access (at least in Europe), but unfortunately it remains severely limited and unreliable; this is problematic given that many user practices and content formats are in urgent need of further analysis. One example of such a content genre is AI-generated video content, such as POV videos that purport to imagine historical situations.
The next speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Katharina Maubach, whose focus here is on data formats for archiving social media data. She works with a project exploring liking activities on social media platforms, especially relating to content from news sites; this covers Disqus, Facebook, YouTube, Xitter, and Instagram.
Ideally, such a cross-platform dataset should be shared with other researchers under FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), but under the Terms of Service of such platforms and their data access conditions this is very difficult; the focus of Katharina’s …
And next up at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library are Marco Wähner and Jan Dennis Gumz, exploring the further use of Wikipedia data on the early German federal election in 2025. Because of the unusual circumstances of the election, following the failure of the governing coalition, there was an increased need for information about the election amongst voters, and Wikipedia (as the only public-interest Very Large Online Platform classified by the EU) played an important role here.
But as a collaboratively edited online platform, Wikipedia represents a particularly special information ecosystem; editing activity here also …
It’s a chilly Tuesday in Frankfurt, the Matildas just advanced to the final of the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup, and I’m at the opening of the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, co-organised by my dear friend Katrin Weller from GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. The programme begins with a day in German, and opens with a paper by Pascal Siegers, who introduces the AVERA project. This emerged from a federal ministry project supporting the collection and sharing of data from research projects on racism and far-right extremism, and a first need it …
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.
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 …
The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is again my QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, this time presenting our research into how generative AI chatbots respond to queries about conspiracy theories. We have already seen how engagement with such chatbots can create harm, and it is important to examine what safety guardrails are in place to prevent chatbots from supporting conspiracy theories.
We examined this by assuming the persona of a casually curious chatbot user, asking a series of questions related to various such conspiracy theories. These include historical stories such as the assassination of John F …
