Prof. Axel Bruns
Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current research focusses on the study of online public communication, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19.
Positions at Weizenbaum Institut
Committees and functions
Editorial Advisory Board member for the journals Information, Communication & Society, Digital Journalism, and Social Media + Society
Projects
- Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (Australian Laureate Fellowship, 2022-26)
- Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery project, 2020-23)
Publications
Selection:
Bruns, A. (2018). Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Peter Lang.
Bruns, A. (2019). Are Filter Bubbles Real? Polity.
Bruns, A. (2019). After the ‘APIcalypse’: Social Media Platforms and Their Fight against Critical Scholarly Research. Information, Communication & Society, 22(11), 1544–1566. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1637447
Bruns, A., Harrington, S., & Hurcombe, E. (2020). ‘Corona? 5G? Or Both?’: The Dynamics of COVID-19/5G Conspiracy Theories on Facebook. Media International Australia, 177, 12–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X2094611