‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Lion Wedel, who begins by highlighting the definitional uncertainties about news and news actors online. This can lead to a misrepresentation of the news and information uses by particular demographic groups, such as young people.

One way to work around this is to focus on the informativeness of sources, rather than a more narrow definition of what is news; but how can this be assessed for a given source? This project worked with participant donations of data download packages from social media platforms, connected with a representative two-wave panel study of …

The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with the great Curd Knüpfer, with an article on what he calls the logic of connective faction (see what he did there?). He begins by noting that online spaces empower some people more than others; they also enable networked propaganda, connect problematic groups through ‘deep stories’, and provide digital surrogate networks – often especially benefitting right-wing actors.

In other words, then, there is a logic of connection faction here, facilitating specific network ties based on communicative acts; this takes on quasi-organisational functions, and enables organisations to connect in digital surrogate networks; and …

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Maysa Amer, whose focus is on platform governance especially in Egypt. Platform governance has been variously approached through self-regulation (in the US), through a citizen rights-centric regulation (in the EU), or through state-led regulation (in China); how is it approached in Egypt, however?

Since the Arab Spring, which served as a substantial disruption of established governance models, Egypt has increased its regulation for digital technologies; new media laws and digital protection regulations also addressed mis- and disinformation, but in doing so also created mechanisms for targeting critical civic actors …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Regina Cazzamatta, whose focus is on the disruption of public spheres in Europe and Latin America by regressive ‘alternative’ media. ‘Alternative’ here is a problematic term, as some outlets are alternative in a progressive sense, trying to provide a platform for marginalised voices, while others are much more regressive and illiberal in ideology and spread mis- and disinformation. Here, the focus is on the latter category of outlets.

How do such regressive outlets justify their institutional roles, then? The project focussed on some 65 such sites that had been identified by fact-checkers …

I’m in Berlin this week for the annual conference of the excellent Weizenbaum-Institut, which opens with a keynote by the great Claes de Vreese, whose keynote asks whether citizens are ready for an AI democracy (it won’t surprise anyone that the short answer is No). Democracy and politics are rapidly transforming at the present moment; democracy is under threat from populist and far-right movements and various other actors, and there are widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world. In a reversal of trends in the 1990s and 200os, the number of true democracies in the world is shrinking …

The second speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Tommy S. Yotes, whose focus is on the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, which took place in February. Indonesian politics often features hoaxes distributed through social media platforms, and scare campaigns repeating to Chinese-Indonesians and Chinese influence on Indonesia are common; they make for easy scapegoats in times of civil unrest.

Much of this is expressed through social media memes that promote hoaxes. Hoaxes themselves are not new in political disinformation, and predate the Internet by many decades; online hoaxes effectively exploit the affordances of digital media, however, and represent memetic …

The first paper session I’m attending at the AANZCA 2024 conference is a panel on democracy in crisis, and starts with my QUT colleague Stephen Harrington. His focus is on ‘dark political communication’, as a way of moving past the overemphasis on mis- and disinformation and recognising that such practices are just one part of a much broader range of communicative dysfunctions in contemporary political systems.

This then also incorporates a greater focus on recent changes in political PR: political PR has been a growing focus in the study of politics in recent decades, with attention paid to its arrangements …

The final presenter in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters, whose focus is on the Russian weaponisation of digital diplomacy in the context of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian propaganda media like RT and have largely been banned in Europe, but Russian embassy and diplomatic accounts continue to operate with impunity on social media platforms (even though they do not have any right to diplomatic immunity here), and this project gathered data on these embassies’ posts from Telegram.

Most of these embassy accounts began posting frequently after the start of the full-scale invasion, and they frequently repost content from a small number of Russian state accounts. Topics in such posts include hard propaganda (disinformation about Ukraine and patriotic material about the war); broader discussions about a multipolar world order and western neocolonialism, as well as the ‘golden billion’ conspiracy theory; and a new Cold War.

Many such embassies are actively targetting countries in the Global South; Marc highlights the exceptional engagement level around the Russian embassy in Bangladesh as an example here, which posted a range of variously Anti-Semitic and anti-American material, highlighted the friendship between Russia and China, and engaged in a variety of typical far-right culture war arguments.

This weaponisation of global diplomacy is playing out on a global scale, and has a memeish cultural dimension. The Kremlin can be understood as an ambient amplifier here.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.

Richard illustrates this through an analysis (using Fabio Giglietto’s CooRNet tool) of coordinated activity on Facebook, and asks how Facebook’s redefinition of CIB might …