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.
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:
Last week saw the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which also marked the end of my six-year tenure on the AoIR Executive (serving two years each as Vice-President, President, and Past President). AoIR remains my intellectual home, and I’ve had a great time in these roles, even in spite of the additional pressure that these past two pandemic years and the resulting need to move our annual conference to an entirely online format have provided – I’ve worked with three excellent Executive Committees, and I’m particularly proud of the way that we didn’t just move the conference online, but created what has become a benchmark for many other online conferences. My sincere thanks to everyone who has served with me on the Exec over these six years – and with first Tama Leaver and then Nicholas A. John taking on the AoIR Presidency over the coming two terms, I know the Association is in very good hands as we return towards in-person events again, too.
But on to this year’s AoIR conference. I ended up being involved in quite a number of panels, drawing on the excellent and diverse research conducted by my colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and collaborating with a range of colleagues from around the world. As the AoIR conference presentation videos themselves will be taken down again by the end of the year, we’ve now made these available via the DMRC YouTube channel, too – and since there’s only so much we can cover in AoIR’s three-minute presentation format, we’ve also recorded longer-form videos for a number of the papers on these panels. For more details on any of these presentations, click on the reference below the video.
Mis- and Disinformation
I’ll start with a panel on mis- and disinformation that is closely related to our current ARC Discovery project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation. This bumper panel of five presentations brings together a large-scale study of suspected ‘fake news’ dissemination networks on Facebook over the past five years with detailed analysis of sharing and engagement patterns around two specific problematic outlets – the Russian state propaganda channel RT and the controversial commercial news channel Sky News Australia; it further combines this analysis of mis- and disinformation practices with two papers reviewing the discourse about ‘fake news’ and related phenomena in Australian media and politics, and in the Russian and Persian Twitterspheres. I must say I’m particularly excited about this panel also because it showcases the breadth and depth of the research being conducted at the DMRC and our partner institutions, and the diversity of our researchers – the RT paper alone covers content in English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and I can’t think of too many other research centres that can readily assemble such a multi-lingual team.
Of the papers presented in the panel, we’ve recoded longer versions for two. The first of these is our large-scale, longitudinal study of ‘fake news’ sharing on Facebook. This draws on our masterlist of some 2,300+ outlets suspected of publishing mis- and disinformation, which we’ve compiled from the existing literature; we’ve gathered any posts that share links to these sites on public Facebook pages and groups, and mapped the networks between these Facebook spaces. The results are indicative of the key groups and communities, from around the world, that are involved in promoting such problematic information, and of the themes they tend to focus on – and they’re a starting point for the next stage of the work in our ARC Discovery project. Here is the long version of the presentation:
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