Katharina Esau

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.

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

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

the link above doesn't seem to work.. here a working one: www.qut.edu.au/study/fees-a...

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

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

📢 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.

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! 🎉

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

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...

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...

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

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

"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 🧵

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.

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

Honest Government Ad | Social Media Ban YouTube video by thejuicemedia

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...

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 ...

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_...

AI Energy Score v2: Refreshed Leaderboard, now with Reasoning 🧠 A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

"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

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. 🧵

Vielen Dank!

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

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