An Update on Recent Presentations

Last week I posted a round-up of the latest publications from my QUT DMRC colleagues and me, listing nine new journal articles and book chapters from our various research projects – investigating mis- and disinformation sharing (in general, and related to the COVID-19 pandemic), analysing the dynamics of polarised online discourses, debunking the idea of echo chambers and filter bubbles, mapping social networks, and examining the evolution of journalistic practices.

This week, I’ll do the same for some of my and our recent presentations. As opportunities for in-person events remain very limited under the current circumstances, most of these have been online – but one small benefit from this is that more of them take the form of recorded videos rather than slides only. Here’s the research we’ve talked about recently, then – click on the various links below to see the full slides, videos, and paper abstracts:

First, a few weeks ago I’ve had another opportunity to outline the key arguments of my 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, in a talk to the Media Futures research centre in Bergen, Norway. My sincere thanks especially to Hallvard Moe for organising this.

Axel Bruns. “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” Invited presentation to Media Futures Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, Bergen, Norway, 16 Apr. 2021.

In another European presentation, I also had the opportunity to present a keynote on my COVID-19 disinformation research with Edward Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington to the PolKomm 2021 conference organised by the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin – many thanks to Christoph Neuberger for the invitation. I presented this in German, and I don’t think there’s a video recording of the presentation; here, though, are the slides at least:

Axel Bruns (with Edward Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington). “Soziale Medien, Massenmedien, offizielle Stellungnahmen: Umgang mit Desinformationen am Beispiel der COVID/5G-Verschwörungstheorien” Invited keynote at the PolKomm 2021 conference, online, 12 Feb. 2021.

A few months earlier, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I also presented a couple of papers at the online conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Of these, one was part of a larger panel that I organised, “‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour’ and Other Online Influence Operations in Social Media Spaces”, which also involved colleagues from Denmark, the UK, the US, and Brazil. Our contribution to the panel covered the (pre-pandemic) #ArsonEmergency disinformation campaign that sought to blame the devastating Australian bushfires in late 2019 and early 2020 on an alleged series of arson attacks in order to downplay their real underlying cause, climate change.

Tobias R. Keller, Tim Graham, Dan Angus, and Axel Bruns. “#ArsonEmergency: Climate Change Disinformation during the Australian Bushfire Season 2019-2020.” Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers 2020 conference, online, 27-31 Oct. 2020.

In addition, my colleague Ehsan Dehghan led a stand-alone paper presentation to investigate the presence of bots and other inauthentic social media activity in the context of the major protests taking place in Iran in 2019 and 2020. This generated some fascinating insights into the diverse array of social and political groups involved in online debates in and about Iran.

Ehsan Dehghan, Brenda Moon, Tobias Keller, Tim Graham, Axel Bruns, and Dan Angus. “Investigating Bots and Coordinated Influence Campaigns in Twitter Discussions of the 2019-20 Iran Protests.” Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers 2020 conference, online, 27-31 Oct. 2020.

Finally, I also had an opportunity to present a brief overview of this and other social media research at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre during the Integrity 2021 workshop at the Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), focussing especially on the work we are doing to study problematic content, the impact of platform algorithms, and other aspects relating to the integrity of social media platforms. My thanks to Luis Garcia Pueyo from Facebook for inviting me to present this work, to my QUT DMRC colleagues for contributing highlights from their work to this presentation, and especially also to my colleague Dan Angus for handling the Q&A session.

Axel Bruns. “Social Media and the News: Approaches to the Spread of (Mis)information.” Paper presented as part of the workshop Integrity 2021: Integrity in Social Networks and Media at the 14th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Jerusalem, Israel, 12 Mar. 2021.

Coming up next, we have a few papers accepted for presentation at the ICA 2021 online conference in late May, and will hopefully also present our work at the ANZCA 2021 and AoIR 2021 conferences in July and October. And as the ECREA 2020 conference has now been rescheduled to September 2021, we’ll finally have a chance to present our accepted papers from last year, too!