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 …

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 …

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.

Such conspiracy theorists are experts at providing apparently simple explanations for complex phenomena. They also clusters together to support each other’s explanations with self-reinforcing theories that …