The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Marisa Porto, whose interest is in local news sustainability during times of crisis – what can be learnt from the performance of local news organisations in Ukraine during the current war? Her project studied 10 local newsrooms there in September and October 2022 (some six months after the Russian invasion), with interviews at times interrupted by air raids and other safety issues.

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Sabina Mihelj, focussing on populist communication about the COVID-19 pandemic, across the US, Poland, Serbia, and Brazil. Such research is critical given the real potential (and genuine experience) of populists assuming positions of political leadership (as in the US or Brazil) and actively contradicting the health advice of pandemic experts.

Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.

The first of these is a new book chapter led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague and former PhD student Ehsan Dehghan, which provides a useful update on his and our current approach to discourse analysis. Building on Ehsan’s work for his excellent PhD thesis, the book chapter connects a detailed methodological overview with the conceptual approaches of Laclau and Mouffe, exploring the presence of agonistic and antagonistic tendencies across a number of case studies. The chapter was published in the third volume in Rebecca Lind’s Produsing Theory book series, which in its title also draws on my concept of produsage, of course.

Dehghan, Ehsan, Axel Bruns, Peta Mitchell, and Brenda Moon. “Discourse-Analytical Studies on Social Media Platforms: A Data-Driven Mixed-Methods Approach.” Produsing Theory in a Digital World 3.0, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. 159–77. DOI:10.3726/b13192/20.

A second new article results from another collaboration with a former PhD student, Felix Münch, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. Building on the work Felix presented at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium in Urbino, this article in Social Media + Society outlines a new approach to mapping the network structure of a national Twittersphere, offering a pathway towards generating some critically important baseline data against which observations from hashtag- and keyword-based studies may be compared.

Münch, Felix Victor, Ben Thies, Cornelius Puschmann, and Axel Bruns. “Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts.” Social Media + Society 7.1, (2021) DOI:10.1177/2056305120984475.

Third, I’m also very pleased to have made a contribution to a new article in Digital Journalism by Magdalena Wischnewski, a visiting PhD scholar supported by the RISE-SMA research network coordinated by Stefan Stieglitz at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Caught up in the travel disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Magdalena spent rather more time with us at the QUT DMRC than we had planned, but happily we were able to put this extra time to good use and investigate the motivations for sharing hyper-partisan content (in this case study, from InfoWars) on Twitter.

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 these phenomena, and there are also many important conversations about how we can engage in rapid research and publication projects without sacrificing the necessary scholarly rigour. At the same time a number of key public outreach activities have also been organised to ensure that we have the platforms to share our findings with the general public.

My own focus in this has been to investigate the patterns of what the World Health Organisation has described as an ‘infodemic’: the viral transmission of mis- and disinformation associated with the coronavirus pandemic that has the potential to do real harm to the general population. This also aligns with a new research project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (funded by the Australian Research Council and also involving Stephen Harrington, Dan Angus, Scott Wright, Jenny Stromer-Galley, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen) which is about to commence.

Together with my colleague Tim Graham I have presented some early observations from this work, focussing especially on the dynamics of some common COVID-19 conspiracy theories, in the Australia Institute’s ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar series. The video from our presentation is below, and I have also posted the full slides and background to the seminar.

Further, I was also very pleased to participate in a public discussion organised by Jack Qiu for the Chinese Communication Association, as part of their Solidarity Symposium series. Together with some of the leading Chinese digital and social media communication researchers, we had an intensive and wide-ranging discussion about the opportunities and challenges of doing this research, from home or elsewhere, and shared some of our own emerging insights into communication patterns during the current crisis. The seminar video is below, and I’ve posted more details elsewhere.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

The final paper in this final session of Social Media & Society 2018 is Sonya Sachdeva, whose interest is in the role of social media in discussing the smoke from wildfires. Wildfires themselves have become more prevalent and more intense around the world, as a result of climate change, and the smoke from such fires can affect far larger areas than the fires themselves. Some two thirds of the United States are affected by the smoke from wildfires, even if they are nowhere near forests and firezones.