‘Fake News’

Snurb — Thursday 23 July 2020 12:39

Does 'Fake News' Travel Faster than 'Real News'? (Spoiler: No.)

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | SM&S 2020 |

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 …

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Snurb — Thursday 23 July 2020 12:17

News Diffusion on Twitter: Comparing the Dissemination Careers for Mainstream and Marginal News (SM&S 2020)

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | SM&S 2020 |

Social Media & Society 2020

News Diffusion on Twitter: Comparing the Dissemination Careers for Mainstream and Marginal News

Axel Bruns and Tobias Keller

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Snurb — Tuesday 21 July 2020 11:45

Researching 'Fake News' about COVID-19

Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Conferences | SM&S 2020 |

I’ve been working from home since mid-March now, but the research continues even if remotely. Here are some more updates on the latest outputs.

First, in addition to our ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar, my QUT colleague Tim Graham and I (with support from our research assistant Guangnan Zhu and Rod Campbell from the Australia Institute) have now also published a report for the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology that investigates the presence of coordinated activity on Twitter in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. We find evidence of coordinated networks of accounts promoting the false claim …

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Snurb — Tuesday 19 May 2020 10:30

Some Research Updates from Home

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Crisis Communication | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Future Fellowship | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) |

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 …

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Snurb — Tuesday 19 May 2020 09:23

Homebrew CommResearch Club: Computational Approaches to Studying COVID-19 (CCA 2020)

Politics | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Crisis Communication | Twitter | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Conferences |

CCA Solidarity Symposium 2020

Homebrew CommResearch Club: Computational Approaches to Studying COVID-19

Jonathan Zhu, Axel Bruns, Wenhong Chen, Cuihua Cindy Shen, Celine Yunya Song, and Wayne Xu

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Snurb — Tuesday 19 May 2020 08:50

'Like a Virus' - Disinformation in the Age of COVID-19 (A@H 2020)

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Crisis Communication | Twitter | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) |

Australia at Home 2020

‘Like a Virus’ – Disinformation in the Age of COVID-19

Tim Graham and Axel Bruns

The COVID-19 pandemic has also spawned an “infodemic” – where life-saving facts and genuine expertise are often overrun by half-truths, lies, and scams going viral online.

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Snurb — Thursday 10 October 2019 14:31

Bots among Us: Prevalence, Influence, and Roles of Automated Accounts in the German Twitter Follow Network (AoIR 2019)

‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | AoIR 2019 |

AoIR 2019

Bots among Us: Prevalence, Influence, and Roles of Automated Accounts in the German Twitter Follow Network

Felix Victor Münch, Cornelius Puschmann, Ben Thies, and Axel Bruns

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‘Fake News’