Read Them Sideways

About Read Them Sideways

Read Them Sideways is the podcast produced by the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. Your hosts Sam, Sebastian, Kate and Klaus take turns to chat with academics from around the world about issues that relate to communications, digital media, internet studies, and much more!

Publisher

DMRC

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Aug 2024

Latest episode

21 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

49 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   21 Oct 2026

   The #MahsaAmini Movement on Twitter w/ Pardis Yarahmadi (#49)

   There is a content warning for this episode for discussion of state-sanctioned violence. In this episode, your host Klaus Groebner speaks with DMRC PhD Reseacher, Pardis Yarahmadi, about her recent work on the Mahsa Amini movement on Persian Twitter. Pardis takes us through the history from the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement through to the protests in Iran that are ongoing today. Pardis then describes how she and her coauthors analysed pro- and anti-regime accounts on X during the Mahsa Amini movement. Click here to read the first paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10714421.2026.2631908) in the broader #MahsaAmini project that Pardis is contributing to, or click here to read the second (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06663-9.pdf).

2. 

   19 Aug 2026

   Teaching Deliberative Democracy to Young People; The Compartilha Project (#48)

   In this episode, your host Sam Vilkins speaks with two visiting scholars to the Digital Media Research Centre - Julia Ester de Paula and Thales Antonelli. They speak about the Comphartilha project, which has been introduced in Brazilian schools to develop skills in deliberative democracy. Julia and Thales explain what deliberative democracy is, the benefit of supporting this in schools, and how a creative game can build confidence and deliberative democratic skills in school students.

3. 

   9 Aug 2026

   Are generative AI chatbots encouraging conspiracy theories? (#47)

   In this episode, host Dr Sebastian Svegaard speaks with PhD researcher Kate FitzGerald about her recently published paper considering the safety guardrails in place when prompting chatbots with conspiratorial prompts. That is, do chatbots like ChatGPT have safety features to keep users safe from being exposed to harmful conspiracy theories? Kate explains the methodology and findings of this paper, that she published with DMRC colleagues Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, and Dan Angus. You can read the article, "Just Asking Questions": Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots (https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/11337), here.

Who has been a guest on Read Them Sideways

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Ashwin Nagappa
• Stephen Harrington
• Timothy Graham
• Kateryna Kasianenko
• Ned Watt

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

10 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 21 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

41

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

Contact Read Them Sideways

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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