The COVID-19 online edition of the wonderful Social Media & Society conference has just started, and my colleague Tobias Keller and I are presenting our latest research via a YouTube video that has now been released. In our study we examine the average dissemination curves for news articles from mainstream and fringe news sources; this analysis is prompted by the persistent media framing of past research as (supposedly) showing that ‘fake news’ disseminates more quickly than ‘real news’.

Leaving aside such disputed labels, we find no evidence of any systematic differences in dissemination speeds on Twitter: during 2019, for example, stories from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC News site (Australia’s most trusted news source) disseminated almost exactly as quickly as those from the hyperpartisan outlet Breitbart: on average, both reached 25% of their eventual dissemination within just under four hours, and 50% after ten hours.

There are, though, notable differences between different site types: content from specialist sites like The Conversation (which publishes scholarly findings and commentary for a general audience) or Judicial Watch (engaging in hyperpartisan legal commentary and lawfare) usually disseminates considerably more slowly than material from more generalist news sites, from the mainstream or the fringes.

Here are the video and slides from our presentation – and a work-in-progress paper (though focussing on only one month of data, rather than all of 2019) is also online.

Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of journalism’s transformation in the wake of sociotechnological transformations resulting from the rise of blogs, citizen journalism, and contemporary social media to the present day.

The focus here is especially on the way that gatewatching and newssharing practices on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have changed audience activities around both breaking news stories and habitual news engagement, on the attempts by the journalism industry and by individual newsworkers to address and accommodate such changes, and on the implications this has for democracy and the public sphere as such.

Are Filter Bubbles Real?

My second new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, is something of an unexpected companion piece to Gatewatching and News Curation, and was published by Polity Books in 2019; it’s also available from Amazon, of course. As I wrote Gatewatching and News Curation, it became increasingly clear how much we are hampered, misled, and distracted from more important questions by the metaphors of echo chambers and filter bubbles that are no longer fit for purpose, and probably never were. From my conversations at the many conferences, I know that many of my colleagues feel the same.

In the book, I offer a critical evaluation of the evidence for and against echo chambers and filter bubbles. If, like me, you’re fed up with these vague concepts, based on little more evidence than hunches and anecdotes, this book is for you; if you think that there’s still some value in using them, I hope I am at least able to introduce some more specific definitions and empirical rigour into the debate. In either case, perhaps I will convince you that the debate about these information cocoons distracts us from more critical questions at present.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Santi Urrutia, whose focus is on the Spanish news aggregator Menéame. This platform is somewhat similar to Reddit; it was launched in 2005, and has some 9 million unique users per month. It enables the sharing of links as well as the up- and downvoting of such posts, as well as follow-up comments, with the ultimate aim of having such posts appear on the front page of the site.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Edson Tandoc Jr., who begins by pointing out the continuing shift to online and social media as a critical source of news – in Singapore, some 47% of users now access news via Facebook, for instance. This also enables audiences as well as news organisations to engage in promotion, distribution, data collection, and engagement around the news.

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.