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‘Fake News’

Snurb — Saturday 5 November 2022 22:06

Conspiracy Theory Followers as Interpretive Communities

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

For the final (boo!) session at AoIR 2022 I’m in a session on feminist approaches to disinformation, and Alice Marwick is already in full flight and discussing the followers of conspiracy theories as interpretive communities. They are social phenomena, communities, and connected by the Internet; their members are socialised into ways of knowledge-making and understanding over time, building their conspiratorial literacy that enables them to make connections between conspiracist factoids and produce counterfactual narrative.

Notably, there are a fair number of young people of colour involved in these conspiracy theories, well beyond the ‘Fox Mulder’ stereotype of the …

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Snurb — Saturday 5 November 2022 20:19

The Evolution of Conspiracy Theories as a Form of Connective Action

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | AoIR 2022 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists interpret supposedly ‘hidden knowledge’ and connect it across domains in order to support their worldviews; this develops …

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Snurb — Saturday 5 November 2022 20:18

COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories on Telegram

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform. Such platforms have been used as a refuge for refugees from mainstream platforms following their deplatforming, and enable them to further foment their extreme views; they have played a role in a range of political debates …

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Snurb — Saturday 5 November 2022 02:29

COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories on Twitter in Nigeria and South Africa

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities. So, this research is interested in the categorical markers for information deemed to be (un)trustworthy in local contexts, the reflection of local milieux by global conspiracy theories, and the localised analysis of this research.

The project gathered data from Twitter in …

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Snurb — Saturday 5 November 2022 02:27

Visual Imagery, Anger, and Anxiety as Predictors of Belief, Sharing, and Fact-Checking

‘Fake News’ | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Cristian Vaccari, who provides a global perspective on visual disinformation. Visual content enjoys a cognitive advantage over text, and is more likely to be treated as realistic; verbal content, too, is more likely to be treated as true if it is accompanied by related images. Most recent social media platforms have a strong audiovisual component, therefore, but equally we have seen a recent rise in visual disinformation.

Images may also elicit emotions more effectively than text, and emotions in turn have implications for how information is processed: anxiety motivates people to …

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Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:40

Coordinated Social Media Behaviour in the 2021 German Federal Election

Politics | Elections | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

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Snurb — Thursday 3 November 2022 20:04

Understanding the Platform Logics of Alternative Social Media Sites

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

This has resulted in the platforming of racism and antisemitism, for instance, and in the emergence of platformed conspiracism. This emerges from the confluence of the specificities of the platforms themselves, and the emergent practices of …

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Snurb — Sunday 30 October 2022 02:57

'Fake News' on Facebook: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study of Problematic Information Dissemination between 2016 and 2021 (ECREA 2022)

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2022 |

ECREA 2022

'Fake News' on Facebook: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study of Problematic Information Dissemination between 2016 and 2021

Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Xue Ying (Jane) Tan, Edward Hurcombe, Nadia Jude, Phoebe Matich, Stephen Harrington, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and Scott Wright

  • 21 Oct. 2022 – Paper presented at the ECREA 2022 conference, Aarhus

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Thursday 27 October 2022 04:31

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior": How Meta Shapes the Discussion of Mis/Disinformation on Facebook (ECREA 2022)

‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2022 |
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Snurb — Thursday 27 October 2022 04:23

A Few More Presentations from ECREA 2022

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2022 |

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:

“Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior”: How Meta Shapes the Discussion of Mis/Disinformation on Facebook from Axel Bruns …
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