First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and German) in-house at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. My sincere thanks especially to my excellent colleague Sofya Glazunova for leading this project.
Just a few days earlier, a new article about the social media amplification of articles in The Conversation that referred to preprint content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic also came out, in Media International Australia. But I have to stress that I only had limited involvement with this work – most of the heavy lifting was done by DMRC Visiting Scholar Alice Fleerackers (usually of Simon Fraser University) and my DMRC colleague Michelle Riedlinger.
A few months ago my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals and I also published a new article in Media and Communication that explores how journalists have perceived and reacted to the challenge of ‘fake news’. This was based on Aljosha’s extensive interviews with newsworkers in Australia, the UK, and Germany, and provides some fascinating insights into the journalistic mindset in relation to this critical challenge.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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