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 these phenomena, and there are also many important conversations about how we can engage in rapid research and publication projects without sacrificing the necessary scholarly rigour. At the same time a number of key public outreach activities have also been organised to ensure that we have the platforms to share our findings with the general public.

My own focus in this has been to investigate the patterns of what the World Health Organisation has described as an ‘infodemic’: the viral transmission of mis- and disinformation associated with the coronavirus pandemic that has the potential to do real harm to the general population. This also aligns with a new research project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (funded by the Australian Research Council and also involving Stephen Harrington, Dan Angus, Scott Wright, Jenny Stromer-Galley, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen) which is about to commence.

Together with my colleague Tim Graham I have presented some early observations from this work, focussing especially on the dynamics of some common COVID-19 conspiracy theories, in the Australia Institute’s ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar series. The video from our presentation is below, and I have also posted the full slides and background to the seminar.

Further, I was also very pleased to participate in a public discussion organised by Jack Qiu for the Chinese Communication Association, as part of their Solidarity Symposium series. Together with some of the leading Chinese digital and social media communication researchers, we had an intensive and wide-ranging discussion about the opportunities and challenges of doing this research, from home or elsewhere, and shared some of our own emerging insights into communication patterns during the current crisis. The seminar video is below, and I’ve posted more details elsewhere.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is QUT DMRC PhD graduate Dr. Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the automated dissemination of conspiracy theories on Twitter – including suggestions that celebrities like Justin Bieber, industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and royals are actually shape-shifting lizards; that planes spread mind-controlling chemtrails; that the Earth is flat; or that the California wildfires were started by a new energy weapon created by the U.S. government.

The final day at AoIR 2019 begins for me with a panel on social media bots, and the first speakers are Felix Münch and Ben Thies who present a paper that I have also contributed to; the slides are below. Social bots have become quite prominent in media coverage of social media in recent times, with particular focus on platforms like Twitter, but it is difficult to assess just how prevalent they are on such platforms, partly also because it is difficult to get a sense of the make-up of larger social media populations.