Blogs

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:

Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.

The first of these is a new book chapter led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague and former PhD student Ehsan Dehghan, which provides a useful update on his and our current approach to discourse analysis. Building on Ehsan’s work for his excellent PhD thesis, the book chapter connects a detailed methodological overview with the conceptual approaches of Laclau and Mouffe, exploring the presence of agonistic and antagonistic tendencies across a number of case studies. The chapter was published in the third volume in Rebecca Lind’s Produsing Theory book series, which in its title also draws on my concept of produsage, of course.

Dehghan, Ehsan, Axel Bruns, Peta Mitchell, and Brenda Moon. “Discourse-Analytical Studies on Social Media Platforms: A Data-Driven Mixed-Methods Approach.” Produsing Theory in a Digital World 3.0, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. 159–77. DOI:10.3726/b13192/20.

A second new article results from another collaboration with a former PhD student, Felix Münch, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. Building on the work Felix presented at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium in Urbino, this article in Social Media + Society outlines a new approach to mapping the network structure of a national Twittersphere, offering a pathway towards generating some critically important baseline data against which observations from hashtag- and keyword-based studies may be compared.

Münch, Felix Victor, Ben Thies, Cornelius Puschmann, and Axel Bruns. “Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts.” Social Media + Society 7.1, (2021) DOI:10.1177/2056305120984475.

Third, I’m also very pleased to have made a contribution to a new article in Digital Journalism by Magdalena Wischnewski, a visiting PhD scholar supported by the RISE-SMA research network coordinated by Stefan Stieglitz at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Caught up in the travel disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Magdalena spent rather more time with us at the QUT DMRC than we had planned, but happily we were able to put this extra time to good use and investigate the motivations for sharing hyper-partisan content (in this case study, from InfoWars) on Twitter.

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.

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 next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on inauthentic coordinated link sharing on Facebook in the run-up to the 2018 Italian and 2019 European election in Italy. ‘Coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ is a term used by Facebook itself, especially to justify its periodic mass account take-downs; the term remains poorly defined, however, and Facebook’s own press releases mainly point to a one-minute video that it has published to define the term.

For the final (wow) session of AoIR 2019 I’m in a session on news automation, which starts with Marijn Martens. He begins by describing algorithms (for instance, news recommender algorithms) as a form of culture, as well as as a form of technical construct – and by highlighting as well how algorithms are being imagined, perceived, and experienced through the mental models that users construct for them.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 panel is Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on the developments of online political communication in Sweden – this covers the 2010, 2014, and 2018 national elections. His focus is especially on the rise of populism in Swedish politics, and the platformisation of messaging in election campaigns.