Presentations Updates: ICA and ANZCA 2021

Oh dear – it’s been quite a while since I last found the time to update this site with some of my recent presentations and publications. And there’s quite a lot of news, so here’s the first instalment in what’s going to be a series of posts. Working through the last few months chronologically, let’s begin with the conferences of the International Communication Association and Australia New Zealand Communication Association, held (online) in May and July 2021, where my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I presented a number of papers on our current research.

At ICA 2021, I was involved in two presentations. First, with our visiting scholars Magdalena Wischnewski (from the University of Duisburg-Essen’s RISE_SMA research project) and Tobias Keller, I worked on a study of newssharing practices by followers of the far-right conspiracy site InfoWars on Twitter; as I’ve noted in a previous update, that study was also published in the journal Digital Journalism.

Magdalena Wischnewski, Axel Bruns, and Tobias Keller. “Shareworthiness and Motivated Reasoning in Hyper-Partisan News Sharing Behavior on Twitter.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association conference, online, 27-31 May 2021.

Second, with my colleagues Eddy Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington from my current ARC Discovery project Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation I also presented an update on our study of the dissemination of the baseless COVID-19/5G conspiracy theory on social, fringe, and mainstream media, focussing here especially on the fringe and media coverage of this content. I’ll have quite a few more updates on this in further updates, so for now I'll simply include the video – slides and other details at the link below:

Edward Hurcombe, Axel Bruns, and Stephen Harrington. “Covering Conspiracy: Mainstream and Fringe Reporting of the COVID/5G Conspiracy Theory.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association conference, online, 27-31 May 2021.

Next came the ANZCA conference in July 2021. Here I was involved in four papers. First, with Eddy, Stephen, and our PhD student Nadia Jude from the Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation project I presented a further update on the COVID-19/5G research, connecting the earlier research into the spread of the conspiracy theory on Facebook with the coverage in fringe and social media (again, more on this in a later post). Here’s the video:

Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, Stephen Harrington, and Nadia Jude. “From the Fringes to the Mainstream: How COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Spread across Social and Mainstream Media.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, online, 9 July 2021.

Second (and third), two papers with my QUT colleagues Michelle Riedlinger and Jean Burgess took inspiration from the tenth anniversary of the Australian science communication site The Conversation to investigate its impact, in general and in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work emerges from our ARC Linkage project Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly Contributions’ Impact on Public Debate and its continuation in the Canadian SSHRC project Global Journalism Innovation Lab. For the original Australian version of The Conversation, and its more recent Canadian edition, we examined the extent to which they are shared by Facebook pages in their respective countries, and how they appear alongside other news outlets; this provides useful information about their positioning in these national mediaspheres. Here’s the video, and more information is at the link below:

Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, and Jean Burgess. “The Conversation, Ten Years On: Patterns of Engagement with The Conversation Australia and Canada.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, online, 8 July 2021.

Michelle led a further study into the social media circulation of preprints of COVID-related research that was highlighted in Conversation articles:

Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. “Sharing Uncertain Science: Mapping the Circulation of COVID-19 Preprint Research Reported in The Conversation on Facebook.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, online, 8 July 2021.

Finally, my colleagues and I from the ARC Discovery project Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation also presented an early insight into our large-scale, longitudinal analysis of the sharing of suspected mis- and disinformation content on Facebook. Here’s the video and further details, but we have also recorded a much more detailed and comprehensive presentation of this work for the Association of Internet Researchers in October 2021, and I’ll share that video and further information in one of my next posts.

Edward Hurcombe, Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Stephen Harrington, and Jane Tan. “‘Fake News’ on Facebook: A Longitudinal Analysis of Link Sharing between 2016 and 2021.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, online, 8 July 2021.

And that’s it for this update – I’ll share our presentations from the ECREA and AoIR conferences, a few other publications updates, and a good deal of further research news, in future posts…