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.
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:
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, and more details are at the link below.
I’ve expanded on this discussion in a new book chapter in the excellent new collection Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society, edited by Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo – many thanks to them both for the invitation to contribute a chapter. This provides a condensed version of the argument against ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and instead encourages us to look for the other, social and societal rather than technological factors driving hyperpartisanship and polarisation. (I’ll have more to say on the research agenda required to do so in a future post.) Here’s the book chapter as a pre-print, and the full book is now also available:
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.
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:
Last week I posted a round-up of the latest publications from my QUT DMRC colleagues and me, listing nine new journal articles and book chapters from our various research projects – investigating mis- and disinformation sharing (in general, and related to the COVID-19 pandemic), analysing the dynamics of polarised online discourses, debunking the idea of echo chambers and filter bubbles, mapping social networks, and examining the evolution of journalistic practices.
This week, I’ll do the same for some of my and our recent presentations. As opportunities for in-person events remain very limited under the current circumstances, most of these have been online – but one small benefit from this is that more of them take the form of recorded videos rather than slides only. Here’s the research we’ve talked about recently, then – click on the various links below to see the full slides, videos, and paper abstracts:
First, a few weeks ago I’ve had another opportunity to outline the key arguments of my 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, in a talk to the Media Futures research centre in Bergen, Norway. My sincere thanks especially to Hallvard Moe for organising this.
In another European presentation, I also had the opportunity to present a keynote on my COVID-19 disinformation research with Edward Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington to the PolKomm 2021 conference organised by the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin – many thanks to Christoph Neuberger for the invitation. I presented this in German, and I don’t think there’s a video recording of the presentation; here, though, are the slides at least:
Twitter is a vital platform for organizing, coordinating, and amplifying voices during protests all around the world, especially in non-democratic countries (Tufekci 2017).
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