After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.
First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:
In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication:
Aljosha Karim Schapals and Axel Bruns. “Responding to ‘Fake News’: Journalistic Perceptions of and Reactions to a Delegitimising Force.” Media and Communication 10.3 (2022). DOI: 10.17645/mac.v10i3.5401.
Here are our slides from this presentation:
And finally, Anja, also kindly invited me to present a brief keynote at the post-conference, and I took this opportunity to highlight once again the deeply problematic role that professional newsroom workers but unprofessional journalists – such as the people working for celebrity, entertainment, sports, tabloid, and clickbait outlets – play in the platforming and amplification of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theory content. We noticed this clearly in our analyses of the spread of the COVID/5G conspiracy theory during the first months of 2020, but this issue is somewhat overshadowed by the challenges that journalists in quality news outlets play as they make difficult decisions about whether to cover the latest false claims made by prominent populist politicians.
Here are the slides from my keynote – and I believe the presentation was recorded as well and should be going online at some point:
And now, onward and upward to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Dublin next week, via a small symposium on Polarisation, Populism, and Propaganda this Friday that my University of Zürich colleague Mike Schäfer and I have organised here in Zürich.
