Thanks (Danke!) to @lisamerten.bsky.social, @ahrabhikat.bsky.social & Helena Rauxloh for visiting us at @qutdmrc.bsky.social for our UA-DAAD project on mapping destructive polarisation across news media outlets in Germany and Australia! Lots of progress! Next stop: Hamburg in September.

Hello World I wanted to share an update on my project, supported by the AXA Research Fund axa-research.org postdoctoral fellowship. The project aims to identify the optimal characteristics of decentralised social media platforms that foster prosocial digital spaces (promote safe communication) 1/8

AXA Research Fund

<div>Supporting Scientific Research to Protect What Matters</div>

axa-research.org

The 2026 DMRC Summer School is officially underway! With 72 delegates in attendance, today's sessions explored a diverse range of topics with the highlight being a keynote address by Nina Jankowicz, internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization.

Planning to start a PhD in Media and Communications in 2026? Come work with me and others at the @qutdmrc.bsky.social! ✨

QUT Digital Media Research Centre@qutdmrc.bsky.social · 7mo ago

PhD scholarship applications are open for a project investigating how public opinion is formed in online spaces, with a focus on the deliberative quality of discussions, social influence dynamics, and platform affordances and governance across major digital platforms. www.qut.edu.au/.../strength....

New preprint: Meta's political content policy cut Italian MPs' reach by 72%. But this is just Italy. If you have Meta Content Library access, you can run this for your country. Germany? France? Brazil? 🔗 osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8dqag_v2 📁 github.com/fabiogiglietto/mcl-political-reach-study

📢 PhD Scholarship at QUT to join my DECRA project "Democratic Resilience Online: Strengthening Public Opinion Formation Amid Digital Threats" @qutdmrc.bsky.social 📅 Applications close: 13/03/2026 More info here: www.qut.edu.au/study/fees-a... Please share and reach out if you have questions!

QUT - Strengthening Public Opinion Formation Amid Digital Threats (PhD scholarship)

qut.edu.au

My colleague Katharina Esau led our analysis of media polarisation in Australia during the Voice to Parliament referendum, where we found some complex and diverging patterns (original presentation here: snurb.info/node/3297).

Incredible work and congratulations to all DMRC researchers who were awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award! 🎉

Katharina Esau@kathaesa.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Honoured to be part of this cohort: five QUT researchers awarded a 2025 ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award $2.53M in total funding 🎉 Grateful for the support by QUT and DMRC @qutdmrc.bsky.social, www.qut.edu.au/news?id=202811

😲 Ooooh, the full programme for the @qutdmrc.bsky.social Summer School 2026 is out now, and it's full of sciencey goodness. If you were still on the fence about signing up, you have until 19 Dec. to do so. ⌛ The Summer School dates are 2-6 Feb. 2026. #dmrcss26 research.qut.edu.au/...

Thinking about using #CSS methods to study #racism, #stereotypes or #hate speech in text? 📐 👉 Check out my first dissertation paper co-authored by @fabiennelind.bsky.social and @hajoboo.bsky.social just published in Annals of the ICA! @icahdq.bsky.social 🥳 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/annc...

Congratulations to DMRC scholars @kathaesa.bsky.social, @snurb.info, @riedlinm.bsky.social, @vilkins.bsky.social, Laura Vodden, and Thet Zin Myint for their new publication in Media International Australia as part of the AANZCA special issue! journals.sagepub.com...

ALL EYES ON PALESTINE - the exhibition of works by 20 brilliant Palestinian artists, organised my mέta-DiEM25, is now open in downtown Athens. For a glimpse of their works, see metacpc.org/en/eyes-on-p...

All Eyes On Palestine - mέta

mέta - the Centre for Post-Capitalist Civilistation, is a cultural and research organisation connected to the politicalmovements Mera25 and Diem 25. mέta

metacpc.org

Climate protesters win groundbreaking class action against Victoria police over use of pepper spray

Climate protesters win groundbreaking class action against Victoria police over use of pepper spray

Potentially precedent-setting case brought after Jordan Brown hit with capsicum spray outside mining and resources conference in Melbourne in 2019 Climate protesters have won a class action against Victoria police over the use of capsicum spray during an anti-mining demonstration in Melbourne. The first class action against Victoria police in relation to alleged excessive use of oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray was heard in the state’s supreme court earlier this year, and a decision was handed down on Friday. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

"Reddit launches high court challenge to Australia’s under-16s social media ban" www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Reddit launches high court challenge to Australia’s under-16s social media ban

Platform fighting world-leading ban on grounds it contravenes implied freedom of political communication in constitution

theguardian.com

Here's a peek at our new Social Media Research Toolkit, a curated collection of more than 50 social media research tools. This toolkit is unique in that it only features tried and tested tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies. (ETA Jan 5, 2026) #academicsky #comsky

After 3 years and 5,322 emails (and counting) our Encyclopedia of Political Communication is finally out at @elgarpublishing.bsky.social 📚 Three volumes ⭐ 431 entries 🎓 581 wonderful authors from across the world A very short 🧵

Honoured to be part of this cohort: five QUT researchers awarded a 2025 ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award $2.53M in total funding 🎉 Grateful for the support by QUT and DMRC @qutdmrc.bsky.social, www.qut.edu.au/news?id=202811

QUT celebrates new Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards

Five QUT researchers have received ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRA), on projects covering topics from social justice to sustainability, valued at $2,529,831.

qut.edu.au

The Australien Government has made an ad about the Social Media Ban for Under-16s, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.

Honest Government Ad | Social Media Ban

YouTube video by thejuicemedia

youtube.com

This paper is now out in Artificial Intelligence Review Bottom line: using LLMs to "simulate humans" sits in a no-man’s-land between theory and empirics—too opaque to function as a model, too ungrounded to count as evidence. Validation remains the core challenge. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · last yr.

Large Language Model-based social simulation has emerged as an exciting new research method. But do LLMs actually resolve the problems that have historically limited use of Agent-Based Models? What do they bring? We review the literature to find out! with Maik Laaroij arxiv.org/abs/2504.03274

How is AI impacting people and the planet, and how can we do better? 🌍 In my most recent TED talk, I shed light on how the current way we do AI and explore ways forward in which we can make it more sustainable: www.ted.com/talks/sasha_...

We’re doing AI all wrong. Here’s how to get it right

Artificial intelligence is changing everything — but at what cost? AI sustainability expert Sasha Luccioni exposes how tech companies' massive data centers are burning through energy and wrecking the ...

ted.com

"According to our analysis, reasoning models use, on average, 100 times more energy than models with no reasoning capabilities (or with reasoning turned off)" Good new analysis of how 'reasoning' mode in chatbots consumes a fairly massive amount more energy than normal mode

AI Energy Score v2: Refreshed Leaderboard, now with Reasoning 🧠

A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

huggingface.co

HEY FRIENDS!! Did you know that Australia - #2 in the world for data centre investment - is now formally missing its climate targets thanks in large part to the resulting surge in power demand? It's massive news - @crikey.com.au let me NERD OUT to explain why: www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/04/d...

🚨New pub alert!🚨 Now available open-access in @journal-of-comm.bsky.social, we (w/ @dkreiss.bsky.social, @danlane.bsky.social, & @shannimcg.bsky.social) critique political communication's "Identity Turn" and offer instead a foundation for studying #polcomm from a *group* perspective. 🧵

Our new article shows how the trend of data dismantling and artificially creating data scarcity about key public issues is affecting scrutiny and journalism investigations. Great working with Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, @antmandan.bsky.social @tjthomson.bsky.social 360info.org/governments-...

Governments are hiding data, threatening democracy. Here’s how it affects you - 360

From being custodians of public knowledge, governments are turning to architects of manufactured ignorance. Amid disappearing evidence, citizens are struggling to hold power to account    Around the w...

360info.org

Next in our round-up of #AANZCA2025 conference slides, we have Laura Vodden's presentation on "Reflections on the value of disagreement in human-LLM collaboration". www.slideshare.net/s... Laura's co-authors were @kathaesa.bsky.social, @tariqchoucair.bsky.social, and @riedlinm.bsky.social

Vodden_Esau_Riedlinger_Choucair_AANZCA_2025_The_Value_of_Disagreement.pptx

Reflections on the value of disagreement in human-LLM collaboration - Download as a PPTX, PDF or view online for free

slideshare.net

I’m so happy and humbled to share that I’ve been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA26) ($528,013 + 1 PhD scholarship funded by QUT) for my project "Democratic Resilience Online: Strengthening Public Opinion Formation Amid Digital Threats" 🥳🎉

Day One of JERAA 2025 delivered. A powerful keynote from Professor Natalie Fenton, thought provoking panels, fresh research presentations in the breakout sessions and a celebratory book launch to close. We are looking forward to another great day today, and the Ossie Awards tonight.

@jeraaaus.bsky.social #JERAA2025 opens with a keynote by Natalie Fenton, where she builds a brilliant argument about why we need to let go of the ideal of independent journalism and acknowledge journalism as interdependent, which enables questioning power relations.

The three day JERAA Conference 2025 is about to start with a keynote presentation from Professor Natalie Fenton. Yesterday, we delivered professional development workshops and hosted welcome drinks for our presenters and guests, learn more in our Sunday Recap. Hope to see you there today!

🔍 Insightful piece debunking some of the "mythology” behind Big Data: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #commsky #polsky #bigdata

Rethinking Scaling Up Content Analysis: A Reappraisal of Justifications and Practices for Large-Scale Content Analysis - Maximilian Linde, Chung-hong Chan, Paul Balluff, 2025

The use of automated coding procedures to scale up content analysis has risen over the last years. Using a mixed-method approach, we examine researchers’ justif...

journals.sagepub.com