For those of you who have access to Australian television, this is an advance warning that the research on coronavirus-related mis- and disinformation that my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have conducted during the first half of this year will be featured prominently in tonight’s episode of the ABC’s investigative journalism programme Four Corners, which focusses on 5G conspiracy theories. A preview is below, and I hope that the full programme may also become available without geoblocking on ABC iView or the Four Corners Facebook page. The accompanying ABC News article has further …
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 …
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 …
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 …
