‘Fake News’

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 …

The post-lunch session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Tauel Harper, whose focus is especially on the role of public service media in combatting such problematic information. Disinformation is a serious threat to democracy in Australia and elsewhere, of course; its impact on the public sphere is deeply concerning, especially since the role of the public sphere is to regulate claims to truth.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relationship between trust in government and the efficacy of policy; this also points to the importance of meaning-making spaces to the …

My QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, focussing on how search engines respond to searches about conspiracy theories. Search engines are a common pathway towards conspiracist information; they have the potential to affect their users’ understanding of such information. What people see when they search for such content also depends directly on how the query itself is formulated, so query variations also need to be studied systematically. Our Australian Search Experience 2.0 project within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society explores the impact of such query …

The third speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Natasha van Antwerpen, whose focus is also on the 2025 Australian federal election. Her interest is in the role of mis- and disinformation during the election. This connects with overall concerns about the effects of mis- and disinformation on societal cohesion, trust in institutions, moral decline, antisocial and harmful behaviours, etc.

Her project examined what mis- and disinformation individuals encountered during the election campaign. This was done through an experience survey: participants installed an app on their phones that would regularly ask them to report on their experiences …

And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.

In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Stef Aupers, focussing on online conspiracy theories. These are not individual, but collectively shared, discussed, and shaped on social media. Existing research often focusses on platforms conspiracism, emphasising the role of technological features and platform affordances; what is much less frequently examined are the active and collective meaning-making practices through which groups of conspiracy theorists construct their online social identities.

This represents a participatory conspiracy culture which enables the social construction of identity; it performs boundary work through which conspiracist communities define and policy the …

For the first paper session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen I am in a session on disinformation and conspiracies, which starts with Marilia Gehrke and Eedan Amit-Danhi, whose focus is on gendered disinformation. Gendered disinformation includes manipulated images, using image editing and increasingly also generative AI; this often references sexuality and personal identity.

Much of the scholarship to date has tended to focus on gender or disinformation, but not on both together; it also tends to focus on intentionality, even though the harm that gendered disinformation produces does not depend on whether this content was shared with …

The next speakers in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference are the great Marie Santini and Debora Gomes Saloes, whose focus is on anti-sustainability narratives in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The environmental agenda in Brazil is highly polarised especially also because of the power of the agribusiness sector; this sector has an interest in environmental deregulation because of its impacts on the environment. How do these actors support discussions in WhatsApp and Telegram groups in Brazil to spread anti-sustainability discourses, and what problematic content is spread in such platforms?

Marie’s Netlab has monitored such public groups on …