Katharina Esau
Senior Research Fellow @qutdmrc.bsky.social, Pol Comm, Digital Publics, Democratic Innovation, Automated & Relational Content & Sequence Analysis, interested in news media, polarisation & opinion formation online: shorturl.at/4WIcP
- Reposted by Katharina EsauHello 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
- Reposted by Katharina EsauThe 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! ✨
- Reposted by Katharina EsauNew 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!
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- Reposted by Katharina Esau😲 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/...
- Reposted by Katharina EsauThinking 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...
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- Reposted by Katharina EsauClimate protesters win groundbreaking class action against Victoria police over use of pepper spray
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- Reposted by Katharina EsauHere'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
- Reposted by Katharina EsauAfter 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
- Reposted by Katharina EsauThe Australien Government has made an ad about the Social Media Ban for Under-16s, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.
- Reposted by Katharina EsauThis 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...
- 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
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- Reposted by Katharina EsauHEY 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...
- Reposted by Katharina Esau🚨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. 🧵
- Reposted by Katharina EsauOur 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-...
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- 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" 🥳🎉
- Starting in 2026, over the next three years, the project will examine how people form opinions, around topics like climate change and immigration, on mainstream digital/social media platforms (Facebook, Reddit & Wikipedia).
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- @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.
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- Reposted by Katharina Esau🔍 Insightful piece debunking some of the "mythology” behind Big Data: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #commsky #polsky #bigdata
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- Reposted by Katharina EsauARC says they’ll announce DECRA and LIEF outcomes tomorrow (Tuesday 25th Nov). In recent times these announcements have been around 11am Canberra time. With 2 schemes on the same day, I assume they’ll announce one of them later in the day (probably DECRA first).
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- Reposted by Katharina EsauThrilled that my first (ever!) and first single-authored article is out in @ausjpolsci.bsky.social 🎉 PRR parties have built a shared transnational discourse on issues like immigration & culture wars. But do their digital publics also take part in this discursive transnationalisation? A 🧵
- New mixed-methods study out in Media International Australia! We compare 🇦🇺 & 🇩🇪 news framing of climate movements — revealing media polarisation: right-leaning outlets often frame activists as threats, while centre/left ones portray them less negatively. 👉 doi.org/10.1177/1329...
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- Reposted by Katharina EsauHuge thanks to my wonderful, interdisciplinary, international team: @inesengelmann.bsky.social @riedlinm.bsky.social @kimosman.bsky.social @voddenlaura.bsky.social @kathaesa.bsky.social Arjun Srinivas & @snurb.info Read the full article (OA) here: doi.org/10.1080/1751... #scicomm #envirocomm
- Reposted by Katharina EsauNew study — out today in Journalism Practice! In it, we analyze the qualities of a news story (about climate-related emergencies) that predict whether/how much it is shared/engaged with on Facebook and republished by other media outlets.
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- @snurb.info: "It's your birthday. You can cry if you want to!" Celebrating @qutdmrc.bsky.social DMRC's 10th bday with a stellar panel 🥳
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- ✨ New article out in Social Media + Society on "The Quality of Connections" ✨ or how reciprocity & #listening can counter destructive #polarisation dynamics online 🧠 Read here (open access 🔓): journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
- "If you care about democracy at all this election, then please consider wisely who you vote for, and perhaps ask their views on supporting press freedom — which is your right to know" @wakeinfright.bsky.social www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/29/p...
- Reposted by Katharina Esau"women's higher level of affective polarization in Western Europe is [...] explained by their stronger disapproval of populist radical right‐wing parties as well as their greater concern for issues around gender and the natural environment." ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
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