‘Fake News’

The next session at AoIR 2023 that I’m in is on conspiracies, and starts with Elisabetta Zurovac, whose focus is on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. These seek to undermine trust in the established science and mainstream media coverage, and this is related to a broader erosion of trust in established knowledge. They encourage people to ‘do their own research’ and are often building also in important ways on visual content.

The visual culture of conspiracy theories draws in important ways also on screenshotting practices: images produced by screen capturing functions on digital devices which claim a certain documentary nature and appeal …

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

Next up in our AoIR 2023 session is the wonderful Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on understanding the processes that led to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt in the United States. She builds on an analysis of every Facebook and Twitter post and Facebook and Instagram ad by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and focusses here especially on Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election.

One of his key points of focus was on mail-in ballots (which were especially common in the 2020 election as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), questioning the validity of such ballots and …

The next session at AoIR 2023 is our own panel, and starts with a presentation by Jessica Walter and Anja Bechmann. Their focus is on influence processes surrounding verified false content across the EU, with particular focus on national differences between EU countries as well as differences driven by other demographic factors. The EU is relatively understudied with respect to the influence of mis- and disinformation, compared to the US and other countries.

The distribution of verified false content represents a case study of unwanted influence; the present study focusses on false content on Facebook as identified by Meta’s third-party …

The final speaker in this last Thursday session at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Steen Steensen, whose focus is on the impact of political fact-checking during the 2021 parliamentary election in Norway (as part of the Source Criticisms and Mediated Disinformation project, or SCAM). Fact-checking during election campaigns has emerged recently as an important practice, but there is not much impact on the reach and impact of such fact-checks – much of the research to date has focussed on the practices of fact-checkers instead.

Ordinary people are more likely to engage with and share fact-checks that are conclusive …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Carolyn Jackson-Brown, who highlights the dilemma for journalists inherent in their dual missions to inform and entertain (or, more to the point, attract clicks from news users). Her focus here is on the reporting of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, and she worked with journalism students on how they received news about the war – in the first place, from TikTok, Twitter, and professional journalists’ accounts.

Quickly, the students discovered that much of the early coverage by pro-Russian actors on TikTok was fake. Moving to the …

The final session on this first day of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference begins with Jaume Suau, whose interest is in the role of news organisations in the spread of mis- and disinformation. What is the impact of disinformation, and how might we study it? Jaume is focussing here first on foreign-sponsored disinformation, whose main objective is to diminish societal trust and increase polarisation; Howe can we assess whether these campaigns have been successful? But in addition, there are also various top actors within society who create and spread disinformation content, and their dissemination strategies and goals might be …

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to …

The next speaker in this fast-paced final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Iuliana Calin, whose interest is in the susceptibility to disinformation. What is new about this today, given the long history of mis- and disinformation throughout history? Iuliana particularly notes the impact of AI and algorithms, of emotions, and of cognitive biases, and aims to build a psycho-social profile of the people most susceptible to disinformation, in order to develop communication strategies to address them.

Her study builds on a survey of 150 Romanian respondents, and tested participants’ susceptibility to disinformation, as well as several other personal traits …