team: @snurb.info, @tariqchoucair.bsky.social, @voddenlaura.bsky.social, @carlylubicz.bsky.social @vilkins.bsky.social, @svegaard.bsky.social, @pzerrer.bsky.social, @cbpuschmann.bsky.social, @inesengelmann.bsky.social, @flxvctr.bsky.social
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
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! ✨
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!
Open to Australian, NZ, and international applicants!
📩 Interested candidates should email me (Dr Katharina Esau: www.qut.edu.au/about/our-pe...) with their CV and a brief statement of interest before formally applying.
Slide from "Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum" (AANZCA 2024).
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! 🎉
DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH CENTRE 2026 SUMMER SCHOOL MON 2 FEB - FRI 6 FEB 2026 QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, BRISBANE
😲 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...
"Reddit launches high court challenge to Australia’s under-16s social media ban" www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
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
The Australien Government has made an ad about the Social Media Ban for Under-16s, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.
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...
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_...
"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
Artificial intelligence and data centres Australia is building domestic capabilities in artificial intelligence. Home chevron_right Do business with Australia chevron_right Explore a sector chevron_right Technology chevron_right AI and data centres On this page Helping to power digital transformation Australian AI Industry Capability Report Why buy Australian AI Why invest in Australia Strategic location as a data centre hub Australia emerges as an AI powerhouse How we can help Success stories Incentives, grants and support Snapshot - Data centres Snapshot - Artificial Intelligence Strategic direction Industry and research ecosystem How Austrade can help Helping to power digital transformation Australia is becoming a regional data centre hub, and a global leader for artificial intelligence (AI). We are helping to power digital transformation in the Asia Pacific and the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies scross broad sectors. Our economy hosts an outsized AI industry, including over 1,100 private AI companies. Adoption of AI is strong across society, with over 400 public firms developing or deploying AI solutions. Our vibrant AI ecosystem and proximity to Asia means we are becoming a service provider for the region, with AI-related patents quadrupling over the past decade. Sydney and Melbourne are both top-ten data centre markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia’s abundance of renewable energy resources means we are a great location for regional, green data centres. This includes supplying Asia via subsea cables. Australia aims to become a global leader in developing and adopting trusted, secure and responsible artificial intelligence, led by the National Artificial Intelligence Centre. Australian AI Industry Capability Report Unlocking potential with Australian AI, an industry capability report on Australia’s capabilities and expertise in artificial intelligence, highlights the achievements of Australian companies in the growing sector. Austra…
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...
Abstract: Recent political communication scholarship finds that groups and identities play a central role in the crises faced by political and media systems globally, particularly in democracies. Yet an individualist orientation in the literature has resulted in key theoretical and conceptual limitations, preventing a broader group-centric theoretical framework from emerging. We synthesize disparate bodies of theory on groups, politics, and communication to offer three basic propositions underlying a group theory of political communication. First, it is the group—not the individual—that is the fundamental organizing unit of social and political life. Second, groups are constituted through communication, which is central to how they define their politics. Third, groups and politics are reciprocally influencing forces through political communication, oriented around power. We offer a framework for studying the role of groups in political communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels, providing a concrete agenda for the study of groups in political communication.
🚨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. 🧵
Vielen Dank!
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
