‘Fake News’

The third speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium session is Christian Stöcker, whose interest is in Germans’ perceptions of disinformation. Germans generally see disinformation as a threat to democracy, and are concerned about their own ability to detect disinformation when they come across it. But how do German business and journalism elites detect and verify such online disinformation? What detection strategies do they employ, and what design features (text, image, video, audio, memes) do they focus on in verifying online content?

The project engaged in some 25 interviews with such elite users from journalism and business (here, especially …

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:

The second day at I-POLHYS 2024 starts with a paper by the great Laura Ianelli and Giada Marino, who will recap I-POLHYS research activities on the connections between polarisation and problematic information. These concepts have been increasingly connected in the literature, and Laura and Giada conducted a systematic literature review of such research – yet only a small handful of the articles referencing both phenomena actually address them in any meaningful way; elsewhere the terms are more often used as buzzwords.

Both phenomena suffer from ambiguous definitions and a blending with other problematic concepts (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) – but …

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

While there can no longer be any question about the reality of catastrophic climate change, consensus about …

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

Mainstream media continue to play a key agenda-setting role on social media platforms, but the way this works differs across social media platforms. Carly collected data from several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) around the UNESCO ‘in danger’ recommendation in 2021. The recommendation was eventually ignored by the …

And the final paper in this ANZCA 2023 session is by Petra Theunissen, whose focus is on the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ movement in Aotearoa and Australia. This is a non-prosocial activist movement, which believes in the illegitimacy of government institutions and sees itself as subject to laws only as they interpret and consent to them. This morphed from a far-right, white supremacist posse comitatus into a broader movement that now overlaps (but is not the same as) other movements including anti-vaxxers, conspiracists, and other groups.

The key beliefs of this movement are that governments are corrupt and extract taxes illegally, in …

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Claire Fitzpatrick and Ashleigh Haw, who extend our focus to a comparative analysis of the ‘freedom’ movements in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. In Aotearoa, the protest was organised by a diverse group of participants without clear leadership, and the atmosphere around the protest declined precipitously as prosocial and family-oriented protests were overwhelmed by some much darker messages calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

This led to increasing radicalisation and violence; the protest became a battleground of warring narratives and bodies. This also formed a part of, and …

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

These events exemplify the use of such media for the organisation of populist protest movements, supported and inflamed by fringe news outlets and enhanced …

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides: