A Round-Up of Presentations from AoIR 2021

Last week saw the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which also marked the end of my six-year tenure on the AoIR Executive (serving two years each as Vice-President, President, and Past President). AoIR remains my intellectual home, and I’ve had a great time in these roles, even in spite of the additional pressure that these past two pandemic years and the resulting need to move our annual conference to an entirely online format have provided – I’ve worked with three excellent Executive Committees, and I’m particularly proud of the way that we didn’t just move the conference online, but created what has become a benchmark for many other online conferences. My sincere thanks to everyone who has served with me on the Exec over these six years – and with first Tama Leaver and then Nicholas A. John taking on the AoIR Presidency over the coming two terms, I know the Association is in very good hands as we return towards in-person events again, too.

But on to this year’s AoIR conference. I ended up being involved in quite a number of panels, drawing on the excellent and diverse research conducted by my colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and collaborating with a range of colleagues from around the world. As the AoIR conference presentation videos themselves will be taken down again by the end of the year, we’ve now made these available via the DMRC YouTube channel, too – and since there’s only so much we can cover in AoIR’s three-minute presentation format, we’ve also recorded longer-form videos for a number of the papers on these panels. For more details on any of these presentations, click on the reference below the video.

Mis- and Disinformation

I’ll start with a panel on mis- and disinformation that is closely related to our current ARC Discovery project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation. This bumper panel of five presentations brings together a large-scale study of suspected ‘fake news’ dissemination networks on Facebook over the past five years with detailed analysis of sharing and engagement patterns around two specific problematic outlets – the Russian state propaganda channel RT and the controversial commercial news channel Sky News Australia; it further combines this analysis of mis- and disinformation practices with two papers reviewing the discourse about ‘fake news’ and related phenomena in Australian media and politics, and in the Russian and Persian Twitterspheres. I must say I’m particularly excited about this panel also because it showcases the breadth and depth of the research being conducted at the DMRC and our partner institutions, and the diversity of our researchers – the RT paper alone covers content in English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and I can’t think of too many other research centres that can readily assemble such a multi-lingual team.

Here is that panel, then:

Daniel Angus, Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, Stephen Harrington, Sofya Glazunova, Sílvia Ximena Montaña-Niño, Abdul Obeid, Souleymane Coulibaly, Simon Copland, Timothy Graham, Scott Wright, and Ehsan Dehghan. “‘Fake News’ and Other Problematic Information: Studying Dissemination and Discourse Patterns.” Panel presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

Of the papers presented in the panel, we’ve recoded longer versions for two. The first of these is our large-scale, longitudinal study of ‘fake news’ sharing on Facebook. This draws on our masterlist of some 2,300+ outlets suspected of publishing mis- and disinformation, which we’ve compiled from the existing literature; we’ve gathered any posts that share links to these sites on public Facebook pages and groups, and mapped the networks between these Facebook spaces. The results are indicative of the key groups and communities, from around the world, that are involved in promoting such problematic information, and of the themes they tend to focus on – and they’re a starting point for the next stage of the work in our ARC Discovery project. Here is the long version of the presentation:

Dan Angus, Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, and Stephen Harrington. “'Fake News' on Facebook: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study of Problematic Link-Sharing Practices from 2016-2020.” Long version of a paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

The second long video showcases the study of Sky News Australia’s presence on Facebook, involving my DMRC colleague Tim Graham and me and initiated by our Australian National University colleague Simon Copland. Here we’ve investigated the dissemination of Sky News videos (both as native videos and as YouTube links) on Facebook, and identified three distinct patterns: while a small number of Facebook pages, especially those officially affiliated with Sky News itself, are highly active in sharing its videos in Australia, a much larger number of pages and groups from the US share its YouTube content occasionally (but when they do, widely). These US spaces are generally affiliated with pro-Trump groups and themes. Finally, in between them is a more amorphous collection of groups and pages from around the world that engage especially with Sky News videos that address prominent fringe conspiracy themes, making spurious claims about secret ‘world government’ agendas. Here’s the video:

Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and Axel Bruns. “From Cable Niche to Social Media Success: International Engagement with Sky News Australia’s Brand of ‘News’.” Long version of a paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

The Australian News Media Bargaining Code

The second major panel that I was involved in at AoIR 2021 presents a very rapid response to the controversy around the Australian government’s News Media Bargaining Code legislation, which prompted a substantial backlash from major platforms like Google and Facebook, and indeed led Facebook to take the extraordinary step of banning news content from its platform in Australia for a good week in February 2021. The panel contains an overview of Facebook’s role in news dissemination in Australia, by Francesco Bailo, James Meese, and Edward Hurcombe; a review of the debate around the News Media Bargaining Code, by Tama Leaver; an analysis of the impact of the February news ban on Facebook, by my DMRC colleague Dan Angus and me; and a reflection on whether the News Media Bargaining Code actually achieved its aims, by Belinda Barnet. Here’s the panel video:

Francesco Bailo, James Meese, Edward Hurcombe, Tama Leaver, Axel Bruns, Dan Angus, and Belinda Barnet. “Australia’s Big Gamble: The News Media Bargaining Code and the Responses from Google and Facebook.” Panel presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

Dan Angus and I also recorded a long-form version of our analysis of the news ban’s influence on content sharing practices on Facebook in Australia. The impact especially on the sharing of news and related content is stark, and a concerning reminder of the power of Facebook’s platform over information flows:

Axel Bruns and Dan Angus. “Facebook’s Australian News Ban: Threat, Impact, and Aftermath.” Long version of a paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

Celebrating The Conversation’s Tenth Anniversary

Finally, I also had a hand in coordinating a panel that marked the tenth anniversary of Australian-based scholarly news site The Conversation, and critically assessed its role in and impact on public debate in the countries and regions where it now operates. This builds in part also on our now concluded ARC Linkage project with The Conversation, Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly Contributions’ Impact on Public Debate, and its continuation in the SSHRC project Global Journalism Innovation Lab, led by Alfred Hermida at the University of British Columbia. My DMRC colleague Michelle Riedlinger kicks us off with a discussion of The Conversation’s role in circulating pre-print research outputs on the COVID-19 pandemic; a paper by Michelle Riedlinger, Jean Burgess, and me then examines the positioning of The Conversation in Australian and Canada in relation to other media outlets from the same countries, in newssharing networks on Facebook; Lars Guenther and Marina Joubert examine the role of The Conversation Africa in public debate; and my colleague Kim Osman concludes the panel by presenting results from her interviews with scholars who have published in The Conversation. The full panel video is here:

Michelle Riedlinger, Alice Fleerackers, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Lars Guenther, Marina Joubert, and Kim Osman. “The Conversation, Ten Years On: Assessing the Impact of a Unique Scholarly Publishing Initiative.” Panel presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

For the second presentation on this panel, I recorded another longer video. This provides more detail on the analyses of newssharing networks on Facebook in Australia and Canada, assessing The Conversation’s positioning in relation to other mainstream and specialist news outlets. Unsurprisingly, and benefitting from its much longer track record, The Conversation Australia is considerably better-established as a part of the Australian news media ecology; but in both cases it’s clear that The Conversation receives more attention and engagement from mainstream, centre-left audiences than from more conservative circles – and that, more generally, there are some concerning indications about the polarisation of the news landscape especially in Australia. Here’s the video:

Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, and Jean Burgess. “The Conversation on Facebook: Patterns of Dissemination in Australia and Anglophone Canada.” Long version of a paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

And that’s it for this update. Some further, big, non-conference news to come in future updates!