‘Fake News’

The fourth speaker in this session the AANZCA 2025 conference is Milica Stilinovic, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories, and especially on how people are drawn from more mundane spaces into far-right conspiracist ideation. This is often described as falling down the rabbit-hole, but the linear descent into alternative thinking that this image describes is not an accurate description of contemporary dynamics. Instead, there are any number of conspiracy theories available for users to explore, from which they may pick and choose their own worldviews.

This may involve drawing a demarcation line between those theories that users are willing …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is again my QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, this time presenting our research into how generative AI chatbots respond to queries about conspiracy theories. We have already seen how engagement with such chatbots can create harm, and it is important to examine what safety guardrails are in place to prevent chatbots from supporting conspiracy theories.

We examined this by assuming the persona of a casually curious chatbot user, asking a series of questions related to various such conspiracy theories. These include historical stories such as the assassination of John F …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Byron Clark, who continues the focus on conspiracy theories with a particular focus on New Zealand. His interest is in discourses of climate change on Reality Check Radio, a station operated by the group Voices for Freedom, which takes an explicitly anti-mainstream perspective.

The station appears to ‘common sense’ and ‘normalcy’, in the process superseding rational discourse and bypassing factual information; instead, it pushes climate change disinformation by engaging in norm-setting and norm-entrenchment that seeks to define key actor groups such as ‘the community’, ‘the media’, ‘politicians’, and …

The final (!) session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on conspiracy theories, and starts with my great QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, presenting her work on the conspiratorial canon. Her focus on the knowledge production processes of conspiracy theorists, and ‘conspiracy theory’ here means an effort to explain events or practices by references to the supposed machinations of powerful people who work to conceal their role. Most people in the Anglosphere have been found to believe in at least one conspiracy theory.

How do conspiracy theorists create knowledge, then? There is a link here to concepts such as participatory disinformation …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Brigid O’Connell, whose focus is on the emergence of the newspaper The Light as a problematic alternative news source. It can be described as dark political communication: political content that seeks to deepen political polarisation and discontent.

The Light’s coverage centres on COVID-19 denialism and conspiracist perspectives; it publishes in print and online, and originated in the UK and Ireland before adding an Australian edition soon after, funded by a coalition of COVID-19 sceptics and others. The publication describes itself as a ‘truthpaper’, and in this aligns …

The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ashleigh Haw, who shifts our focus to the qualitative aspects of encountering and engaging with mis- and disinformation during the 2025 Australian federal election. Participants here were 35 voting-age residents of the Deakin, Dickson, Gilmore, and Werriwa electorates who had also participated in the survey and diary components of the research project. These were interviewed for the project, exploring their information resilience, civic reasoning, and critical media literacy.

This enabled the researchers to further explore the reasons that participants had for identifying certain content as mis- and disinformation …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Jee Young Lee, whose focus is on a content analysis of mis- and disinformation examples from the 2025 Australian federal election. Australian voters remain highly concerned about such problematic information, but fewer than one third of voters actively engage in fact-checking themselves; they rely instead on their gut feeling about the veracity of information rather than on concrete evidence of its truthfulness.

In that light: what do audiences regard as mis- and disinformation; how do determine this, and what do they do? This project used a digital diary …

My final session for today at the AANZCA 2025 conference is a panel on mis- and disinformation in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with Kieran McGuinness, whose focus is on a survey of Australian adults during May and June 2025, conducted on behalf of the project by YouGov.

Respondents were asked about their access to and understanding of news during the election, Mainstream news, face-to-face discussions, political ads, and social media were the most prominent sources. Amongst social media users, mainstream news brands, politicians and parties, ordinary people, individual journalists, and alternative voices on YouTube were most prominent …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Derek Wilding, with a reflection on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its attempts to regulate disinformation. Through the DSA, the EU has moved from a regime of platform self-regulation to co-regulation: this might be understood as a form of enforceable self-regulation, since it does not depend solely on industry players.

It contrasts with the Australian environment, where self-regulation by the members of the DIGI industry association remains the current model after the co-regulation model of the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill failed to make it through …

The second speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Luke Heemsbergen and Fan Yang, whose focus is on disinformation as a vibe: there is increasing evidence that regulating and combatting disinformation by addressing their factuality is ineffective, since its central effect is to spread a general sense of distrust in government and other authoritative actors, and since disinformation spreaders tend to continue to share such content even in full knowledge that it is incorrect.

Australia still needs more critical disinformation research: this study in particular focusses on Chinese-speaking Australians who encountered disinformation on platforms such as WeChat …