For those of you who have access to Australian television, this is an advance warning that the research on coronavirus-related mis- and disinformation that my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have conducted during the first half of this year will be featured prominently in tonight’s episode of the ABC’s investigative journalism programme Four Corners, which focusses on 5G conspiracy theories. A preview is below, and I hope that the full programme may also become available without geoblocking on ABC iView or the Four Corners Facebook page. The accompanying ABC News article has further …
I’ve been working from home since mid-March now, but the research continues even if remotely. Here are some more updates on the latest outputs.
First, in addition to our ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar, my QUT colleague Tim Graham and I (with support from our research assistant Guangnan Zhu and Rod Campbell from the Australia Institute) have now also published a report for the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology that investigates the presence of coordinated activity on Twitter in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. We find evidence of coordinated networks of accounts promoting the false claim …
The COVID-19 pandemic has also spawned an “infodemic” – where life-saving facts and genuine expertise are often overrun by half-truths, lies, and scams going viral online.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.
This is not necessarily a purely Australian phenomenon – other news organisations also deliberately publish controversial content in order to pursue user engagement – we might need to rethink the focus …
