‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Rory Sharp. His focus is on 5G conspiracy theories, which extend well beyond the normative definition of 5G as a communications technology. There is here a general sense that 5G is a compromised form: that it is tainted by technological hype and paranoia.

There is a difference here between conspiracist and conspiratorial ideation, too: 5G conspiracy theories are not conspiratorial. Most of these link back in some way to a post by notorious Twitter account @dril, which in itself commented on a …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Lena Kostuj, whose focus is also on the understandings of AI in conspiracist communities. Such communities have always tried to make sense of technologies, and are now turning their interest towards artificial intelligence as well – this produces a form of algorithmic folklore, both about as well as created by and through algorithms, which shapes how these groups relate to AI technologies.

The focus here is on the German conspiracy theorist Christian Köhlert, who is especially popular on Telegram and YouTube; he …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Calum Lister Matheson, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories; these are driven by psychological factors, but also substantially facilitated by the information access provided by Internet technologies – from hypertext through search to AI. This has resulted in the demise of symbolic efficiency.

This can be understood through paranoid-metonymies theory: it begins with foreclosure that rejects organising signifiers, fills the gaps with delusion, and produces certainty and a commitment to absolute truth beyond the evidence. In conspiracy culture, this works through …

The next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on conspiracy theories, with a focus especially on UFOs and UAPs. We start with an introduction by Marco Bastos. This has produces several hypotheses: especially, about UFOs as cover for military black ops; or about UFOs as a real, alien phenomenon. This hardly matters any more, though, because UFO claims also feed into an arms race in space technologies.

The rise of conspiracy theories also contributes to democratic backsliding: they tie into perceptions of a lack in transparency in democratic processes, especially in the US …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Eva-Maria Vogel, whose study is a field experiment in the context of South Africa’s upcoming local elections in November 2026 that explores the impact of TikTok influencers on the election. There are already concerns about disinformation during the elections, and this project works with the AfricaCheck fact-checking organisation, which will develop fact-checks of current disinformation to be distributed by the project.

This tests, then, whether a single fact-checker account, a large-scale influencer, or a fleet of smaller-scale influencers are more effective at …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Mykola Makhortykh, with a video presentation. His interest is in Russian propaganda curation on search engines. Russian propaganda has of course been a major concern since at least the 2016 US elections; its influence operations have only increased since the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Much of this is driven by algorithmic information curation systems – via the Russian search engine Yandex, of course, but also through other mechanisms that affect western search engines. This project engaged in an agent-based algorithmic auditing of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and …

The last panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with Morgan Wack, whose focus is on X’s Community Notes programme. Community Notes enables users of X to add notes to misleading posts, and these are then rated by other users; if these ratings show agreement even across partisan lines, the notes are publicly attached to posts, and reduce reposts and likes on the platform by nearly 50%.

YouTube, Meta, and TikTok are now implementing similar crowdsourced annotation approaches; this is part of their move away from professional and platform-funded fact-checking and moderation frameworks. But only 14% of all …

The final speaker in this morning session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Eva Mayerhöffer, whose focus is on the role of digital trace data in understanding exposure to alternative information. One point of departure for this is often to start with a list of alternative and problematic news outlets which are then identified in survey responses, data donations, or digital trace data; the focus here is then also often only on the top domains, i.e. the most frequently accessed sources.

But such a reduction to the most notorious sites substantially underestimates exposure, since there is a very …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Lucie Čejková, who shifts our focus to conspiracism as a now fairly common style of thinking, which has potential implications for democratic societies. The role of social media sites in all this has been especially highlighted here, in both academic research and public debate, and of course social media platforms remain a key source of news for a large part of the population, too.

The present study examines the link between social media use and individual conspiracism through a systematic literature review of some 160 articles …