Researching 'Fake News' about COVID-19

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 that the coronavirus was engineered as a bioweapon, as well as pushing a range of other conspiracy theories. The full report is out now – and here’s the press release from the Centre for Responsible Technology.

Further, I also spoke about this and related research as part of an online panel discussion organised by the University of Queensland Art Museum. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touched on the spread of COVID-related ‘fake news’, the question of how platforms, regulators, and the general public should respond to such mis- and disinformation, and the need for much more (and much more interdisciplinary) research in this area. Here’s the full video:

We Need To Talk About...COVID-19, the media and fake news from UQ Art Museum on Vimeo.

In addition to all this, there’s quite a bit more work in the pipeline. I’ll have another update soon on our paper and video presentation for the (online) Social Media & Society 2020 conference, starting in a couple of days, which examines the question of whether ‘fake’ news really disseminates more quickly on Twitter than ‘real’ news (spoiler: it doesn’t), and another forthcoming article that examines the spread of those crazy COVID/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook. More on those soon!