As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.
But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am. My stay here also involves a couple of teaching roles: I’m teaching an undergraduate course that builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (and I’m hoping to make those lecture recordings available publicly at some point, in case they’re of use in other teaching) and a Masters seminar that explores the many concepts for what has now replaced ‘the’ public sphere (and I’m hoping to convert those ideas and discussions into some new writing eventually, too). Plus, there are plenty of opportunities for future collaborations between the IKMZ and my home institution, the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.
But while I’m here in the centre of Europe I’m also taking the opportunity to connect with a number of key colleagues and communities in my field. Next week, on 13-14 October 2022, I’ll be at the Norwegian Media Research Conference in Stavanger, where I’ve been invited to present one of the keynotes and will outline some of the ideas that are also animating my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation.
I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.
On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this symposium. When we submitted the proposal for this paper, we’d assumed the election would have been well over by now, but as the Prime Minister opted for the latest possible election date in this legislative period, what we had to present was a preliminary overview of the social media campaigning and advertising patterns we’ve ben able to observe so far.
This is based on our ongoing weekly updates with the latest analysis of social media campaign developments, published through the DMRC research blog. Updates 1, 2, and 3 are online as I write this, and we’ll get started on the next post tomorrow – keep an eye on the DMRC blog.
But for now, here are our slides from the talk at Villa Collina, and the full paper abstract is also online:
Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.
On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk, available below, also gave me an opportunity to speak more generally about the continued challenges of researching social media platforms and their activities, and to outline some of the work that my colleagues and I in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are doing to address these issues. The audio on the recording is a little soft, but I hope the overall discussion comes through clearly enough; slides and further details are linked below.
A few days later I gave a talk to the Social Media Data Science Group at the University of Sydney – many thanks to Monika Bednarek for the invitation. This was a great opportunity for me to step through a number of different, related concepts from groups through communities to publics, and organise some thoughts on how to distinguish these broadly similar but nonetheless distinct formations from one another. This is important especially in the context of network analysis, which all too often jumps to calling collections of similar entities a ‘community’ without paying sufficient attention to the specific meaning of that term: not every cluster is necessarily a community in the proper sense of the word.
In July 2021, I was exceptionally honoured to be awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship: a five-year, A$3.5 million research grant that represents the highest level of individual recognition by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Laureate Fellowships are exceedingly rare – no more than 17 are awarded each year, and they go very predominantly to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; indeed, as far as I can tell, mine was the first awarded to a researcher from the Media and Communication field in the 13 years of the scheme’s existence.
Most importantly, the Laureate Fellowship enables me to build a team of four Postdoctoral Research Associates (five-year, full-time postdoctoral positions) and four PhD researchers (three-year PhD scholarships) starting in early 2022, plus another four PhD positions to follow mid-project, in 2024. The whole team will be based with me and our excellent community of research staff and students at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane, Australia. If these positions are of interest to you, read on (and if you know of others who might be interested, please share this information with them)…
Commencing formally in February 2022, my Laureate project addresses the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation in online communication. It continues a trajectory of recent work that began with my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, which in turn sparked the 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real? that examined in some more detail whether there was any evidence for the claims that ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ were increasingly enclosing us all in ideologically pure information environments on digital and social media platforms. (Spoiler: there wasn’t.)
I ended that book with a call to action: if the problem wasn’t simply technological (‘social media create filter bubbles’), then what is driving the increase in hyperpartisanship and polarisation that we seem to be experiencing in many countries around the world? Indeed, stepping back a little further from that premise, is polarisation actually increasing? Can we use digital trace data to assess this, and systematically compare such assessments over time (to measure the speed of change) and across national contexts (to examine whether some political and media systems are more resilient than others)?
I’ve also outlined my path towards these questions, and the Laureate Fellowship, in my recent QUTeX talk during the ADM+S News & Media Symposium – I hope this provides a useful introduction to these concerns, and overview of my research agenda from here (there’s also a follow-up post on the QUTeX blog):
I’ve not yet had the chance to write much about one of the major new projects I’m involved with: the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), a large-scale, multi-institutional, seven-year research centre that investigates the impact of automated decision-making technologies (including algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other such technologies) on all aspects of our personal and professional lives. In particular, for the first year of the Centre I’ve led the News & Media Focus Area, which recently held its inaugural symposium to take stock of current research projects and plan for the future. (This was also the time for me to hand that leadership over to my colleagues Jean Burgess (QUT) and James Meese (RMIT), as I step back from that role to concentrate on another major project – more on this in a future update.)
Within News & Media, I’ve also led a major research project which we launched publicly in late July, and which is now producing first research outcomes: the Australian Search Experience. Inspired by an earlier project by our ADM+S partner organisation AlgorithmWatch in Germany, this project investigates the extent to which the search results Australian users encounter as they query search engines like Google are personalised and therefore differ from user to user; if they are, this would leave open the possibility of user being placed in so-called ‘filter bubbles’ – a concept which I’ve questioned in my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real? We even have a promo video:
Investigating such personalisation is difficult: since every user is assumed to see a personalised set of search results, we need to compare these results across a large number of users in order to determine whether there is any significant personalisation, and what aspects of these users’ identities might drive such personalisation. While some studies approach this challenge by setting up a large number of ‘fake’ user accounts that are given a particular user persona by making them search repeatedly for specific topics that are expected to contribute to the search engine’s profile for the account, AlgorithmWatch’s earlier, German study took a different approach and invited a large number of real users to contribute as citizen scientists to the study. To do so, they were asked to install a browser plugin that regularly searched for a predefined set of keywords and reported the results back to AlgorithmWatch’s server.
Our ADM+S project uses this same data donation approach, but extends it further: we query four major search engines (Google Search, Google News, Google Video, and YouTube), and we are able to vary our search terms over the duration of the project. Like the earlier project, we also ask users to provide some basic demographic information (in order to link any systemic personalisation patterns we may encounter with those demographics), but never access any of our participants’ own search histories. Our browser plugin is available for the desktop versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, and I’m pleased to say that more than 1,000 citizen scientists have now installed the plugin.
In the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, I lead the Digital Publics programme – a growing collective of researchers who study the role of mainstream and social media as spaces for public communication. Over the past few years, this has necessarily required a particular focus on the dark sides of online communication, from the role of social, fringe, and mainstream media in the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories through the continuing transformation of the journalism industry to the problematic role of platform operators in shaping the environments for public communication. And these are just the major themes of my own work – my excellent colleagues in the Digital Publics programme are exploring an even broader and more diverse range of research agendas.
To present a detailed overview of our current work, we are presenting a one-day Digital Publics Symposium on 17 November 2021, under the general heading of Information Disorders. Opening with a keynote by renowned disinformation researcher Kate Starbird from the University of Washington, the Symposium features research by DMRC researchers covering a wide range of current concerns, from large-scale studies of the dissemination of ‘fake news’ content on major social media platforms to detailed forensic analysis of specific issues and events, and from innovative computational methods for the analysis of problematic communicative patterns to in-depth conceptual considerations of possible responses to such information disorders.
If you’re able to join us in Brisbane for the Symposium, we would love to welcome you at QUT; for everyone else, we invite you to follow the proceedings and engage with the discussion through out livestream of the event. Click on the image below to find out more about the Symposium, to see the event programme, and to register as an online or in-person attendee:
I’ve mentioned some of these here before, but I’m very happy to say that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Edward Hurcombe, Stephen Harrington, and I have now completed our trilogy of articles that investigated the dissemination of the baseless and nonsensical conspiracy theory that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow related to 5G mobile telephony technology from its origins in obscure conspiracist sites and groups through social and fringe media to mainstream coverage. For a while, such dissemination was so widespread that it even resulted in physical attacks against mobile phone towers and technicians in the UK and elsewhere, in April 2020, and was covered in an episode of the investigative TV programme Four Corners on Australian television (though the eventual episode provide far too much of a platform for the conspiracy theorists themselves to spread their disinformation, unfortunately).
We divided our work on this topic into three segments: our first article, published in Media International Australia in August 2020, examined the dissemination of the conspiracy theory in its constantly evolving forms through public pages and groups on Facebook; here, we observed a number of phase shifts in the transmission of these ideas as they were amplified by increasingly visible and influential participants and communities. A second article, published in Digital Journalism in September 2021, complemented this analysis by examining the fringe and mainstream media coverage of the conspiracy theory, and showed the parallel evolution of that coverage from minor conspiracy-friendly sites through uncritical entertainment and tabloid media coverage to mainstream media reporting. Finally, our book chapter in the excellent new collection Communicating COVID-19, edited by Monique Lewis, Eliza Govender, and Kate Holland, has just been released, and examines these parallels between the social, fringe, and mainstream media coverage. It points especially to the weak spots in journalistic coverage – uncritical entertainment and tabloid reporting that treats celebrities as ready sources of clickbait without considering the damage that such coverage can do – that enable conspiracy theories to travel beyond their obscure communities of true believers, and makes a number of critical observations that should be considered by the journalists, platform operators, and authorities forced to engage with such mis- and disinformation.
Here are those three articles, then – click on each title for a pre-print version, or on the publications for the final published result:
Last week saw the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which also marked the end of my six-year tenure on the AoIR Executive (serving two years each as Vice-President, President, and Past President). AoIR remains my intellectual home, and I’ve had a great time in these roles, even in spite of the additional pressure that these past two pandemic years and the resulting need to move our annual conference to an entirely online format have provided – I’ve worked with three excellent Executive Committees, and I’m particularly proud of the way that we didn’t just move the conference online, but created what has become a benchmark for many other online conferences. My sincere thanks to everyone who has served with me on the Exec over these six years – and with first Tama Leaver and then Nicholas A. John taking on the AoIR Presidency over the coming two terms, I know the Association is in very good hands as we return towards in-person events again, too.
But on to this year’s AoIR conference. I ended up being involved in quite a number of panels, drawing on the excellent and diverse research conducted by my colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and collaborating with a range of colleagues from around the world. As the AoIR conference presentation videos themselves will be taken down again by the end of the year, we’ve now made these available via the DMRC YouTube channel, too – and since there’s only so much we can cover in AoIR’s three-minute presentation format, we’ve also recorded longer-form videos for a number of the papers on these panels. For more details on any of these presentations, click on the reference below the video.
Mis- and Disinformation
I’ll start with a panel on mis- and disinformation that is closely related to our current ARC Discovery project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation. This bumper panel of five presentations brings together a large-scale study of suspected ‘fake news’ dissemination networks on Facebook over the past five years with detailed analysis of sharing and engagement patterns around two specific problematic outlets – the Russian state propaganda channel RT and the controversial commercial news channel Sky News Australia; it further combines this analysis of mis- and disinformation practices with two papers reviewing the discourse about ‘fake news’ and related phenomena in Australian media and politics, and in the Russian and Persian Twitterspheres. I must say I’m particularly excited about this panel also because it showcases the breadth and depth of the research being conducted at the DMRC and our partner institutions, and the diversity of our researchers – the RT paper alone covers content in English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and I can’t think of too many other research centres that can readily assemble such a multi-lingual team.
Of the papers presented in the panel, we’ve recoded longer versions for two. The first of these is our large-scale, longitudinal study of ‘fake news’ sharing on Facebook. This draws on our masterlist of some 2,300+ outlets suspected of publishing mis- and disinformation, which we’ve compiled from the existing literature; we’ve gathered any posts that share links to these sites on public Facebook pages and groups, and mapped the networks between these Facebook spaces. The results are indicative of the key groups and communities, from around the world, that are involved in promoting such problematic information, and of the themes they tend to focus on – and they’re a starting point for the next stage of the work in our ARC Discovery project. Here is the long version of the presentation:
Here’s the next instalment of my blog posts as I continue to work through my backlog of research updates – it’s been a big year, and it looks like there will be a fair few further posts to come. In this one I’ll focus on the European Communication Conference (ECREA), which was held online in September this year.
My own major contribution was another paper on the myth of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, reviewing the evidence and debunking the simplistic claims about the damaging effects that these phenomena are supposed to have. Here’s a video of the presentation, and more details are at the link below.
I’ve expanded on this discussion in a new book chapter in the excellent new collection Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society, edited by Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo – many thanks to them both for the invitation to contribute a chapter. This provides a condensed version of the argument against ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and instead encourages us to look for the other, social and societal rather than technological factors driving hyperpartisanship and polarisation. (I’ll have more to say on the research agenda required to do so in a future post.) Here’s the book chapter as a pre-print, and the full book is now also available:
Oh dear – it’s been quite a while since I last found the time to update this site with some of my recent presentations and publications. And there’s quite a lot of news, so here’s the first instalment in what’s going to be a series of posts. Working through the last few months chronologically, let’s begin with the conferences of the International Communication Association and Australia New Zealand Communication Association, held (online) in May and July 2021, where my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I presented a number of papers on our current research.
At ICA 2021, I was involved in two presentations. First, with our visiting scholars Magdalena Wischnewski (from the University of Duisburg-Essen’s RISE_SMA research project) and Tobias Keller, I worked on a study of newssharing practices by followers of the far-right conspiracy site InfoWars on Twitter; as I’ve noted in a previous update, that study was also published in the journal Digital Journalism.
Second, with my colleagues Eddy Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington from my current ARC Discovery project Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation I also presented an update on our study of the dissemination of the baseless COVID-19/5G conspiracy theory on social, fringe, and mainstream media, focussing here especially on the fringe and media coverage of this content. I’ll have quite a few more updates on this in further updates, so for now I'll simply include the video – slides and other details at the link below:
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