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 …
Like most of us, the current COVID-19 crisis has forced me to work from home for the foreseeable future, but my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have remained just as busy – in fact, of course, as a significant driver of journalistic coverage, of newssharing through social media (including both legitimate news and various forms of mis- and disinformation), and of general social media debate and discussion, the crisis intersects directly with some of our core research areas.
Many of us in this field now have urgent research projects in train that address some of …
