‘Fake News’

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The …

The past few months have been quite busy with conferences and events, so here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to recently. I’ll start here with a handful of videos from recent events – more on my recent and upcoming conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters in subsequent posts…

First, in May I was delighted to participate in a three-part series on “Future-Proofing the Public Sphere”, hosted by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance and the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, and the Digital Media Research Centre at …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 is E. Brooke Phipps, whose focus is on how TikTok activists in the US fight conservatism and disinformation. This can be seen as a form of trolling directed at disinformation propagators, and thus turning a prominent practice of the far right against it: tactical trolling has now also emerged as a key form of digital resistance by left-wing activists (also in South Korea). This is also a youth practice: nearly half of all TikTok users are understood to be younger than 30 years. TikTok as a place is important here: place is a …

The next speaker in this fast-paced final AoIR 2022 session is Maximilian Schlüter, who is also interested in disinformative communities. He notes that a specific understanding of disinformation has emerged that does not necessarily capture all forms and formats of disinformation – today, disinformation is far more widespread and mundane than previously imagined.

Maximilian’s focus is particularly on white male supremacist communities, and here on ‘Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity’ (RMEM) memes and how they are circulated and remixed: are we asking the right questions and telling the right stories as we study such forms of disinformation, and does this approach …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 is Elizabeth Losh, focussing to begin with on NATO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Challenge for students, which also addressed disinformation as a growing threat, and Elizabeth was a mentor to some of the teams’ involved. The brief for the challenge highlighted the threat to Ukraine, and the role of algorithms in promoting problematic information, but ignored key problematic platforms like VKontakte; instead, platforms were often seen as compliant participants in the process.

The 2022 Cybersecurity Challenge extended this further, and focussed in part also on anti-feminist disinformation; this employed a similarly limited perspective. NATO is …

For the final (boo!) session at AoIR 2022 I’m in a session on feminist approaches to disinformation, and Alice Marwick is already in full flight and discussing the followers of conspiracy theories as interpretive communities. They are social phenomena, communities, and connected by the Internet; their members are socialised into ways of knowledge-making and understanding over time, building their conspiratorial literacy that enables them to make connections between conspiracist factoids and produce counterfactual narrative.

Notably, there are a fair number of young people of colour involved in these conspiracy theories, well beyond the ‘Fox Mulder’ stereotype of the …