Axel Bruns’s research while affiliated with Queensland University of Technology and other places

This article introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping , using vector embeddings of network actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users, as a framework for methodological advancement beyond the limitations of conventional network analysis and visualization. In particular, the methodological framework we outline here has the potential to incorporate multiple distinct modes of interaction into a single practice map; can be further enriched with account-level attributes such as information gleaned from textual analysis, profile information, available demographic details, and other features; and can be applied even to a cross-platform analysis of communicative patterns and practices. The article presents practice mapping as an analytical framework and outlines its key methodological considerations. Given its prominence in past social media research, we draw on examples and data from the platform formerly known as Twitter to enable experienced scholars to translate their approaches to a practice mapping paradigm more easily, but point out how data from other platforms may be used in equivalent ways in practice mapping studies. We illustrate the utility of the approach by applying it to a dataset where the application of conventional network analysis and visualization approaches has produced few meaningful insights.

Advancements in Large Language Models have been showing important research opportunities within the field of communication studies. It offers the capacity to conduct large-scale content classification and annotation with low computational expertise and reduced manual coding efforts, potentially allowing more possibilities for researchers in social sciences to explore understudied topics (Bail, 2023; Chang et al., 2024). Because of its functioning and vast domains and language training, LLMS also potentially unlocks more generalizable, complex, and diverse analyses across various communication materials than previous computational tools and approaches (Chang et al., 2024). These materials encompass a wide spectrum, ranging from journalistic content to the digital discourse of political actors and social media conversation threads. At the same time, LLMs also raise important concerns with potential biases, data privacy, models’ transparency, environmental impact, and power imbalances (Jameel et al., 2020; Fecher et al., 2023). Although highly discussed recently, as a recent topic LLMs still need deeper theoretical elaboration and dialogue between empirical investigations specifically for communication scholars (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2024; Guzman and Lewis, 2020). Our panel assembles a collection of case studies that harness LLMs to tackle text classification and annotation tasks related to media and communication problems, issues, and topics. These research papers engage in an exploration of: (a) pipeline structuring: diverse methodologies for structuring effective pipelines tailored to this form of analysis; (b) tools and models comparison: comparisons of the various LLMs tools and models available for text classification and annotation, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses; (c) optimal variables and tasks: identifying the variables and tasks where LLMs demonstrates exceptional performance and reliability; (d) limitations: discussions on the existing limitations of these tools, including limitations related to specific tasks, variables, languages and data formats; (e) prompt development: strategies for developing, adapting and adjusting prompts that allows better results for specific tasks; and (e) ethical and political dimensions: an examination of the ethical and political considerations inherent in the deployment of LLMs in communication research. This panel puts together valuable efforts of different research groups across the world to not only use, but also reflect on the use of LLMs in Communication studies. They show important avenues for the field to think about different approaches to validity, ethics and truthful cooperation between humans and computational models without erasing the challenges of doing so, and the disagreements - not only between humans, but between humans and their computational language models too.

Political polarisation – at the level of individual issues or broader ideologies, and expressed through differences of opinion on policies, divergent affective attachments, contrary interpretations of available information, or distinct patterns of interaction with other partisans – is necessarily always closely related to the information that individuals and groups engage with as they form and reinforce their own opinions about a given issue or topic, and contest the views of others. News in all its forms, from legacy to emerging, and mainstream to fringe media, continues to play a particularly important role in such information diets, but news coverage can itself be polarised and polarising. This panel addresses polarisation in and by the news through a series of papers that examine the various stages of the news production and engagement process. Drawing on innovative methods and novel datasets, these five papers offer new perspectives on the patterns and dynamics that affect news quality, news distribution, news engagement, and news fact-checking in digital and social media environments. In combination, they offer a new and comprehensive overview of how we might further investigate news polarisation in contemporary contexts. Paper 1 assesses polarisation in news coverage. Centred on the issue of climate change, it investigates patterns of news coverage across the media landscape in Australia – a country which has been particularly severely affected by extreme climate events in recent years. The paper highlights the challenges in accessing full-text news content at scale, and utilises a novel combination of manual and computational content coding techniques to investigate the patterns of news polarisation across four dimensions. Paper 2 investigates what sources of news are frequently recommended to users of prominent search engine Google News. Drawing on a long-term data donation project in Australia, the paper reviews the range of sources recommended for a variety of political and controversial search queries, and assesses the breadth of the political spectrum that these prominent recommendations represent. It also examines whether such patterns differ across individual queries or broader topic categories. Paper 3 shifts our attention to the sharing of news content on social media platforms. Drawing on long-term, large-scale datasets from Facebook and Twitter, it analyses the sharing of links to Australian news sources during 2022, and thereby reveals patterns of interactional and interpretive polarisation. These may be related to the political alignment of users and outlets, but also to news quality and other factors. Paper 4 takes a network approach to the study of news sharing on Twitter in Germany. Assessing the topical content of links to German news shared during one month in 2023, and the political affinities of the users sharing these links, the study finds marked differences between the sharing practices and patterns of left-leaning, conservative, and far-right users, as well as between sharing practices on different topics. Finally, Paper 5 closes the loop by examining the role perceptions of political fact-checkers, and their potential to contribute polarisation or depolarisation. Drawing on a series of interviews with staff in Australian fact-checking organisations, it provides a deep insight into their self-understanding, especially with respect to the extent and limitations of their impact on polarised debates in society. In combination, then, these five papers address questions of news polarisation throughout the stages of the journalistic process from news production to distribution and engagement all the way to the critical scrutiny of political statements reported in the news. Overall, they make substantial new conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions to the study of news polarisation. Extended abstracts for all five papers are included in the submission.

Political trends around the world have drawn further scholarly attention to the study of polarisation, especially also as it is expressed and potentially deepened by public communication on digital and social media platforms. The very concept of polarisation itself, however, remains ill-defined especially in communication research, where it is often used as a mere buzzword without sufficient definition – even in spite of a wide range of conceptual approaches that variously emphasise issue-centric, ideological, affective, interpretive, interactional, or other facets of polarisation (Marino & Ianelli, 2023; Esau et al., 2023). Issue-centric approaches to the study of polarisation often connect it with specific controversies, and therefore align well with controversy mapping and related methodological frameworks. Especially where they study such controversies in digital and social media contexts, they also point to the significant intersections between the circulation of problematic information by and the deepening of polarisation between partisan actors, as well as to the often asymmetrical nature of such contestations (where groups on one side of a given controversy are substantially more likely to use problematic information to support their cause than the groups opposing them; Kreiss & McGregor, 2023). Unfortunately, much of the recent research in this field has continued to focus on a small number of key political contexts, with emphasis especially on the US and UK. This panel reviews evidence on the intersection of controversies, problematic information, and polarisation through a series of case studies from six continents: North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Oceania. In combination, these studies present a substantially more comprehensive picture of global similarities and local differences. Paper 1 explores the polarising impact of disinformation campaigns in favour of incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brasilian presidential election. It reveals a potentially unusual bottom-up disinformation pattern that produces a reverse influence flow from grassroots activists to political leaders and complicates standard distinctions between mis- and disinformation; this also creates new challenges for fact-checking efforts. Paper 2 examines the dynamics of Italian public opinion in response to the introduction of COVID-19 restrictions in early 2020. Drawing on longitudinal survey data, it identifies a range of perspectives from extreme communitarian to extreme libertarian, and connects this to patterns of legacy and social media use, attitudes towards political institutions, and levels of exposure to mis- and disinformation. Paper 3 compares the divergent dynamics of political debates on Indigenous rights in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In the campaigning leading up to Australia’s 2023 referendum on greater Indigenous recognition and representation, it identifies a highly asymmetrical contest that flipped public opinion from strong support for Indigenous recognition to a 60% No vote within less than one year. In the heated political debate about Māori rights in Aotearoa New Zealand since the 2023 election of a new, conservative coalition government, it identifies continuing Māori/non-Māori solidarity in resistance to the reduction of rights stemming from the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Paper 4 investigates the debates on Twitter about measures to combat sexual violence in Indonesia that came into effect in 2021 and 2022. Drawing on extensive content and network analysis, the study shows that, diverging from the #metoo-style activism against sexual discrimination, harassment, and violence that is common in Western contexts, in Indonesia this agenda is interpreted predominantly through the lens of an underlying polarisation between secular nationalist and Islamist political groupings in the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy. Paper 5 compares the online dynamics of the abortion debate in the US before and after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, focussing especially on political candidates’ social media messaging on abortion rights. Analysis of Democrats’ and Republicans’ posts about the issue, and of broader Twitter and Facebook user engagement with the issue, is expected to point to substantial differences between the parties, timeframes, and platforms. In combination, these five papers cover a rich selection of case studies on the intersections between controversies, problematic information, and polarisation around the world. Extended abstracts for all five papers are included in the submission.

This article introduces the concept of «fringe democracy» as a multidimensional phenomenon emerging in the contemporary public sphere when alternative digital platforms (spaces/affor- dances/governance patterns), marginalized actors (groups/practices/ideologies), and hetero- dox narratives (contents/imaginaries/representations) challenge liberal democratic processes. Fringe democracy is not merely about the rise of non-mainstream platforms but arises from complex interactions between fringe and mainstream platforms, actors, and narratives (as shown by recent changes in mainstream platform moderation practices, which reduce fringe actors’ dependence on alternative, freer spaces). While some marginalized actors may pro- pose heterodox narratives driven by democratic values, fringe democracy functions as a form of pseudo-democracy from the margins, exploiting democratic participation mechanisms to undermine core democratic principles. This phenomenon spans ideological spectra, although far-right actors have a particularly notable power to weaken liberal democracies through dis- ruptive communication strategies. After defining fringe democracy, the article introduces em- pirical and theoretical studies highlighting how interactions between mainstream and fringe platforms shape polarized narratives and amplify manipulative practices. Ultimately, the article addresses methodological and epistemological challenges in researching fringe democracy and advocates a strategy (integrating policy interventions, platform regulations, and media literacy efforts) to effectively address issues posed by the evolving digital public sphere within hybrid media systems, balancing freedom of speech with the necessity of safeguarding democracy.

This article presents results from a sub-project established under thebanner of the ADM+S Australian Search Experience ‘citizen science’research project. The aim was to characterise news recommendationspresented to Australians through Google News. The project investigatedthe search results for 20 keywords related to Australian politics and globalissues, including names of politicians, political parties, global sportingevents and various COVID-related terms. Keywords were organised intotwo keyword sets: ‘Australian Politics’ and ‘Global Issues’. Theresearchers found that Google News search results were not personalisedwith respect to demographics or geography. A small subset of domainsdominated the first page of results. While several major Australian newsdomains were regularly observed for the ‘Australian Politics’ keyword set,the ‘Global Issues’ category featured more news domains from the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom. These findings help to better understandhow search engines present news content to ordinary internet users.

Much of the scholarly attention on disinformation has focussed on the role of social media, thus overlooking the political actors who themselves propagate disinformation and the mainstream news outlets that report on them. In this article we argue that disinformation has now become so widespread because outright lies are an effective way for political actors to attract and manage public attention. Political strategists have likewise worked out that cognitive biases and social factors are strong enough to overcome the ‘rational’ impulses of citizens who should, notionally, reject obvious lies. And, finally, journalists, who should be a bulwark against such behaviour, have mostly failed to address this problem because of an overly cosy relationship with those in power, and because of a lingering fealty to ‘objectivity’. We conclude the article by arguing that journalism needs to significantly re-think how it approaches the political field.