DOMINIQUE CARLON
2026
Ehsan Dehghan, Dominique Carlon, Kateryna Kasianenko, Ashwin Nagappa, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh (Feb 5, 2026)
The entangled dynamics leading to the sedimentation of polarisation on political Reddit
Information, Communication & Society
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Motivated by the dearth of research providing a comprehensive assessment of how various aspects of Reddit contribute to political polarisation on the platform, this study examines the dynamics of cross-ideological communication across 11 major subreddits over 16 years. Going beyond purely textual elements, we analyse a broad range of possibilities for overlaps between subreddits. This includes common users, information-sharing, cross-posting, cross-commenting, links to other subreddits, and discursive identities. We observe minimal overlaps in all these indicators. This is true even for subreddits with highly similar discourses and extends beyond a left-right dichotomy. These patterns, we argue, emerge from an entanglement of platform design, moderation practices, user agency, discourses, and broader socio-political contexts. Our findings show how this entanglement leads to the sedimentation of polarisation on Reddit, wherein the fragmentation of political subreddits is irreducible to discourses, identities, or platform design alone. These findings also challenge the common framing of r/politics as a town square for cross-ideological deliberation and exposure.
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2026
Timothy Graham & Dominique Carlon (Feb 4, 2026)
On the Internet no-one knows you're not a bot: 'Botting' on Reddit as participatory culture
New Media & Society
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Repetitive online communication is often labelled a ‘bot problem’ by platforms, policymakers and users. However, repetitive posting does not exclusively indicate automation; humans also engage in bot-like posting for various purposes. We adopt the term ‘botting’ to describe repetitive posting enacted through manual, semi-automated, or fully automated means. While emerging research has linked manual botting practices to commercial or fame-seeking motivations, we extend this scholarship by examining botting on Reddit – a pseudonymous platform that lacks the affordances typically associated with monetisation or personal branding. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we examine a case study in which mass-scale, repetitive posting of the mushroom emoji emerged as ‘in-group’ behaviour within Reddit’s participatory culture, prompting a performative counterpublic response. Our findings challenge the binary between human and automated posting, and underscore the importance of situating research on AI-generated and automated content within the cultural and contextual frameworks that shape its production and reception.
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2025
Anthony McCosker, A & Dominique Carlon et al., (Dec 2, 2025)
Critical capabilities for inclusive AI: Implementation Pathways Report
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The Implementation Pathways Report presents a practice-based approach to achieving inclusive AI, developed through collaborations with community, humanitarian, health, legal, and learning organisations. Inclusive AI is considered not as a technology add-on but as a participatory process, centring capability building and equitable benefit. Central to this reframing is the role of participatory processes and intermediaries – the individuals, organisations, and public or online spaces – that act as capability converters, translating technical features into community-relevant outcomes.
The report details insights from partner-led projects with Telstra, Australian Red Cross, CSIRO, the National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), Economic Justice Australia, Tactical Tech, State Library of Queensland, and Good Things Australia. Through these collaborations we are generating an evidence base to help situate the rapid embedding of generative AI, while testing strategies and methods for improving AI inclusion. The report finds that inclusive AI requires translation, adaptation and grounding in community contexts beyond compliance with principles and technical fixes. Partner-led projects and intermediaries are essential in bridging AI development with community needs.
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2025
Dominique Carlon (2025)
Platforms as architects of AI influence: rethinking moderation in the age of hybrid expression
Transnational Legal Theory
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The widespread availability of generative AI has reshaped how content is created, circulated, and governed across social media platforms. As users experiment with synthetic media—remixing, reposting, and negotiating hybrid communicative practices_platforms have emerged as central agents in the AI attention economy, forging lucrative partnerships and developing proprietary features that shape how AI content is legitimised. This article proposes that conventional human rights frameworks, particularly freedom of expression, are ill-equipped to govern increasingly hybrid media, where authorship and provenance are fluid, and emerging dilemmas hinge more on perceived value than rights violations. Within this context, spam policies operate as under-scrutinised instruments of discretionary control, enabling platforms to curate visibility and legitimacy through opaque mechanisms. Drawing on Reddit’s provenance-agnostic, participatory moderation model, the article proposes that collective negotiation by online communities—around what constitutes valuable or acceptable content—offers a more transparent, context-sensitive, and adaptive approach to moderation of hybrid human-AI expression.​
2025
Anthony McCosker. A., Tracy De Cotta., Dominique Carlon, Zafaryab Rasool, Yong-Bin Kang, Kath Albury (17 Nov, 2025)
Resilience by design: lessons on inclusive AI capabilities from the Australian Red Cross community climate adaptation pilot​​​
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This evaluation assesses a pilot project where the Australian Red Cross and the Victorian Dargo community co-designed a preparedness platform using local knowledge, open data and artificial intelligence (AI). It showcases how ethical, inclusive technology development can empower communities against climate risk, while highlighting challenges and innovations in co-designing disaster resilience tools with local stakeholders.
The findings offer valuable lessons for future technology development through community co-design. They illuminate recurring obstacles and showcase adaptable innovations that can guide the creation of more responsive, inclusive and impactful preparedness solutions.
Key recommendations
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Ensure early communication around privacy and disclaimers and engage developers from the outset in discussions.
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Use locally sourced data where possible to enhance relevance, accuracy and community trust.
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Empower local leads for community outreach.
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Consider ways to represent outside stakeholder interests such as tourists in planning and design.
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Consider the way technology design can achieve community-wide benefits by moving beyond individualised app design to consider collective uses.
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Ensure accessibility for users with varying levels of digital literacy.
2025
Dominique Carlon, Jean Burgess, & Kateryna Kasianenko (2025)
The lives and afterlives of community-created bots on Twitter: A minor history, Convergence ​​​
This article presents a minor history of the beneficial community-created bots that once flourished on Twitter, showcasing their important but overlooked role in enhancing platform cultures, accessibility, and user experience. We present a typology of Twitter’s community-created bots, positioning them as marginal but active characters, tracing how and why they were crafted and coevolved with, and in connection to, platform changes. The article offers a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse and association of bots with nefarious actors, showcasing the value of botmaking practices as forms of community-led innovation that have enriched social spaces through automation. In the context of current trends towards platform enclosure, the article argues for the continued importance of user innovation cultures in an AI-infused and potentially decentralised internet, proposing that we should not forget, overlook, or undermine the potential of creative, purposeful and community-initiated automation in fostering accessible, sociable, and joyful communication environments.
2025
Jean Burgess, Dominique Carlon, Elife Buse Doyuran, Hanxun Huang., Christopher Leckie., Phoebe Matich., Anthony McCosker, Michael Richardson., et al (31 Aug, 2025)
Voice AI and authenticity: current issues and emerging challenges ​​​
Voice technologies are rapidly being integrated into generative artificial intelligence (AI) enabled systems and applications. These developments are provoking new questions, and intensifying old ones, in a wide range of everyday contexts. This working paper surveys and historically situates these developments, reviews the current literature in relevant fields, and outlines some emerging responses to the challenges such technologies present to the issue of authenticity in real-world settings.
The next wave of AI-enabled voice technologies has the potential to be helpful and useful in many communication, media and customer service settings, and to improve digital service provision. But these technologies also carry heightened risks of deception in interpersonal communication, change how information and culture is interacted with and valued, and amplify concerns around issues such as digital inequality and AI-driven labour displacement in knowledge and creative work – all areas where ideas about and struggles over ‘authenticity’ play a central role.
The multifaceted nature of voice synthesis technology demands a correspondingly layered approach to its ethical, legal, cultural and practical implications. As synthetic voices become more widely deployed, robust frameworks and regulatory responses are necessary to mitigate potential harms and foster accountability around responsible use and development of companies that offer voice AI services.
2025
Dominique Carlon (2025)
Bots and Other Platform Inhabitants: Stories of Inter-Bot Governance, Automated Play, and Protest on Reddit​​​
In this thesis I redefine bots as cohabitants of platform environments: entities that both shape and are shaped by the social, cultural, and political dynamics of the spaces they inhabit. Grounded in three years of digital ethnographic research on Reddit, it explores how bots negotiate norms, enforce governance, and shape platform cultures alongside human users. Thematic studies on inter-bot governance, automated play, and platform-politics showcase bots as gatekeepers, performers, and coordinators of protest, offering insight into how automated and AI-generated contributions are accepted, contested, and negotiated. The thesis identifies emerging practices and cultures of inter-bot communication, providing novel insight into relations with and between bots in digital communities.
2025
Ehsan Dehghan., Dominique Carlon, Kateryna Kasianenko., Ashwin Nagappa, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh (2025)
Sedimented Polarisation: Discourse, Materiality, and Moderation Co- Shaping the Political Reddit
This study examines political discourse across eleven major subreddits over sixteen years to understand the dynamics of cross-ideological interaction on Reddit. Through a framework combining discourse theory and new materialism, we analyse information-sharing, cross-posting, and discursive formations across political communities. Our findings lead us to conceptualise ‘sedimented polarisation’—a discursive-material condition where polarisation becomes an empty signifier around which political discursive formations take shape. Despite Reddit’s design allowing cross-community engagement, we find minimal interaction between discursively dissonant spaces. While r/politics is often presented as a space for cross-ideological deliberation and exposure, it fails to function as a town square. We observe a fragmentation across political subreddits and discourses beyond the left-right dichotomy. These patterns emerge from an entanglement of platform design, community moderation practices, user agency, discourses, and broader socio-political contexts.
