‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Edson Tandoc Jr., who begins by pointing out the continuing shift to online and social media as a critical source of news – in Singapore, some 47% of users now access news via Facebook, for instance. This also enables audiences as well as news organisations to engage in promotion, distribution, data collection, and engagement around the news.

The second paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Klaus Zilles, whose focus is on the distribution of disinformation on WhatsApp. The messaging platform has been embroiled in disinformation events in a number of countries in recent times, and has now begun to fund several research projects into the phenomenon, including the present study in Spain.

The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Marco Toledo Bastos and Shawn Walker, whose interest is in the ephemerality of hyperpartisan news content. Posts, images, and videos often disappear within hours and days of posting, before they can be fact-checked and before standard archiving platforms such as national archives or the Internet Archive would capture them. Alternatively, the content of these posts may change after posting, meaning that the captured content does not reflect what users first saw.

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

A quick update from on the road: I’m currently in Germany, where I’ve participated in the kick-off meeting for a new EU-funded project on social media analytics in society and crisis communication that is led by Stefan Stieglitz from the University of Duisburg-Essen – more on this as the project develops, no doubt.

But before that meeting I also had the opportunity to participate in a press briefing organised by the Science Media Center in Germany, which makes scholarly research more visible to journalists: this was to discuss the likelihood of disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to the European Union elections in late May 2019. The event included statements from Oliver Zöllner from the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Christian Grimme from the University of Münster, and me, and covered the technical, societal, and ethical dimensions of the ‘fake news’ issue in the present context, followed by Q&A with the journalists present.

Below is the video from the event – all discussion was in German, of course: