The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.

Here are the slides for this presentation, and my liveblog of Dan’s presentation follows below:

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even they might be aware are far removed from any objective truth.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am. My stay here also involves a couple of teaching roles: I’m teaching an undergraduate course that builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (and I’m hoping to make those lecture recordings available publicly at some point, in case they’re of use in other teaching) and a Masters seminar that explores the many concepts for what has now replaced ‘the’ public sphere (and I’m hoping to convert those ideas and discussions into some new writing eventually, too). Plus, there are plenty of opportunities for future collaborations between the IKMZ and my home institution, the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.

But while I’m here in the centre of Europe I’m also taking the opportunity to connect with a number of key colleagues and communities in my field. Next week, on 13-14 October 2022, I’ll be at the Norwegian Media Research Conference in Stavanger, where I’ve been invited to present one of the keynotes and will outline some of the ideas that are also animating my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation.

In the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, I lead the Digital Publics programme – a growing collective of researchers who study the role of mainstream and social media as spaces for public communication. Over the past few years, this has necessarily required a particular focus on the dark sides of online communication, from the role of social, fringe, and mainstream media in the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories through the continuing transformation of the journalism industry to the problematic role of platform operators in shaping the environments for public communication. And these are just the major themes of my own work – my excellent colleagues in the Digital Publics programme are exploring an even broader and more diverse range of research agendas.

To present a detailed overview of our current work, we are presenting a one-day Digital Publics Symposium on 17 November 2021, under the general heading of Information Disorders. Opening with a keynote by renowned disinformation researcher Kate Starbird from the University of Washington, the Symposium features research by DMRC researchers covering a wide range of current concerns, from large-scale studies of the dissemination of ‘fake news’ content on major social media platforms to detailed forensic analysis of specific issues and events, and from innovative computational methods for the analysis of problematic communicative patterns to in-depth conceptual considerations of possible responses to such information disorders.

If you’re able to join us in Brisbane for the Symposium, we would love to welcome you at QUT; for everyone else, we invite you to follow the proceedings and engage with the discussion through out livestream of the event. Click on the image below to find out more about the Symposium, to see the event programme, and to register as an online or in-person attendee:

I’ve mentioned some of these here before, but I’m very happy to say that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Edward Hurcombe, Stephen Harrington, and I have now completed our trilogy of articles that investigated the dissemination of the baseless and nonsensical conspiracy theory that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow related to 5G mobile telephony technology from its origins in obscure conspiracist sites and groups through social and fringe media to mainstream coverage. For a while, such dissemination was so widespread that it even resulted in physical attacks against mobile phone towers and technicians in the UK and elsewhere, in April 2020, and was covered in an episode of the investigative TV programme Four Corners on Australian television (though the eventual episode provide far too much of a platform for the conspiracy theorists themselves to spread their disinformation, unfortunately).

We divided our work on this topic into three segments: our first article, published in Media International Australia in August 2020, examined the dissemination of the conspiracy theory in its constantly evolving forms through public pages and groups on Facebook; here, we observed a number of phase shifts in the transmission of these ideas as they were amplified by increasingly visible and influential participants and communities. A second article, published in Digital Journalism in September 2021, complemented this analysis by examining the fringe and mainstream media coverage of the conspiracy theory, and showed the parallel evolution of that coverage from minor conspiracy-friendly sites through uncritical entertainment and tabloid media coverage to mainstream media reporting. Finally, our book chapter in the excellent new collection Communicating COVID-19, edited by Monique Lewis, Eliza Govender, and Kate Holland, has just been released, and examines these parallels between the social, fringe, and mainstream media coverage. It points especially to the weak spots in journalistic coverage – uncritical entertainment and tabloid reporting that treats celebrities as ready sources of clickbait without considering the damage that such coverage can do – that enable conspiracy theories to travel beyond their obscure communities of true believers, and makes a number of critical observations that should be considered by the journalists, platform operators, and authorities forced to engage with such mis- and disinformation.

Here are those three articles, then – click on each title for a pre-print version, or on the publications for the final published result: