‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 is Robert Topinka, whose interest is in reactionary digital cultures in the ‘post-pandemic’ environment. He is also releasing a report on this work. Such reactionary politics in the context of COVID-19 largely involves the rejection of the general consensus, and a call to take control of your own body. This is linked with far-right body culture, and any debunking and criticism from the mainstream just ends up reinforcing the message.

Instead of tracking extremist content to label it as disinformation and debunk it, there is therefore a need to understand how people drift …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Maria Kyriakidou, whose focus is on journalistic understandings of disinformation. This is as part of the Countering Disinformation research project.

The project drew on nine semi-structured interviews with UK-based journalists, editors, and fact-checkers in January 2020 to explore how they understood disinformation, and how saw their role in tackling it. Such perspectives may well have evolved further in the face of the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic, of course.

Much of the focus in the journalists’ responses was on political lies at this stage, therefore, and they noted that politicians now appear far …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is another one of my temporary University of Zürich colleagues, Anna Staender. Her study sought to develop a typology of the spreaders of misinformation across multiple countries. These may include state actors, politicians and celebrities, or alternative media outlets, for instance, but not enough is known yet about their impact; the specific focus here is therefore on alternative or hyperpartisan media actors.

Previous research has seen such alternative media as a corrective to mainstream media, but such alternative media outlets may now also simply attack opposing political views at the expense of …

The final session on this Thursday at ECREA 2022 that I’m attending is on disinformation, and begins with a paper by Laura Alonso-Muñoz and Andreu Casero-Ripollés that is being presented by proxy. It focusses on the circulation of misinformation via social media in the context of COVID-19. Residents in the Global South were most active in spreading such misinformation, it appears, and the present study therefore compares Spain, Brazil, India, and the United States via a quantitative survey of some 2800 people (or about 700 per country) in July 2021. These countries were selected because of their high social media …

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even …

In the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, I lead the Digital Publics programme – a growing collective of researchers who study the role of mainstream and social media as spaces for public communication. Over the past few years, this has necessarily required a particular focus on the dark sides of online communication, from the role of social, fringe, and mainstream media in the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories through the continuing transformation of the journalism industry to the problematic role of platform operators in shaping the environments for public communication. And these are …