‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Rob Topinka, whose focus is on conspiracy theories that are promoted by reactionary ideological entrepreneurs like Russell Brand. Their rhetoric doesn’t need to make any positive propositions: all they need to do is point out things that (in their view) have ‘gone too far’, in in doing so position themselves as bold new heroes who speak for ‘the people’; this can be understood as a new and reactionary form of counter-culture.

People like Brand have gradually moved further into this milieu, and are spouting increasingly far-right rhetoric; they also position …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the conversation between then-Dutch PM Mark Rutte and historian Yuval Harari at the 2020 World Economic Forum, comparing their utopian and dystopian viscous about AI – and this kicked off a new round of conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum as well as the future uses of AI to subjugate global populations.

The WEF is a common target for such conspiracy theorists – its concepts and ideas, including the “Great Reset”, are frequently distorted into anti-WEF narratives, including by prominent far-right politicians and …

Day two at the AoIR 2024 conference starts for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, which is opened by Daniël de Zeeuw. His focus is on the growth of the use of the term PsyOp, or psychological operation – these are usually military or government operations to change public opinion through unconventional means. Conspiracy theories about PsyOps have been pushed increasingly especially by far-right actors in the U.S., including Fox News, and often originate from 4chan; there is a substantial increase especially from 2016 onwards.

But through this process the term PsyOp has also lost its core meaning …

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference panel is my QUT colleague Daniel Whelan-Shamy, with whom I’ll present our paper on polarisation on Indigenous debates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In both countries there is a long and complex history of colonial oppression towards their respective Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum sought to remedy this through the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, while in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed as early as 1840 and gradually led to greater recognition and rights for Māori groups. Our work examines the patterns of potentially …

The next session at the AoIR 2024 conference conference is a session that I co-organised which focusses on controversies, and starts with a presentation by Felipe Soares. His focus is on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, which finally brought the reign of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to an end. The election was beset by the dissemination of disinformation on social media, especially about the integrity of the electoral process, and this also led to calls for military intervention in the political system, and coup attempt by Bolsonaro supporters in Brasilia on 8 January 2022.

What is difficult here is that …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Mette Bengtsson, whose focus is on the relationship between Meta and its network of approved third-party fact-checking organisations. Fact-checking has developed considerably around the world in recent years, and there are several global organisations connecting this network – including the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Meta currently partners with some 90 fact-checking organisations around the world, covering some 60 languages. These can use Meta’s data tools to identify currently circulating claims and select them for assessment; once such assessments have been made, Meta can use them in adjusting its algorithmic ranking of …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Paola Palomino-Flores, whose interest is in the intersections of media literacy and misinformation. Misinformation here is defined as false information that is shared unintentionally by users who believe it to be true but have failed to verify its accuracy. This can still disseminate quickly and then cause some very serious harms, of course, confusing people and leading them to poor decision-making.

Paola’s focus is on Peru, and she notes the high reliance of Peruvians on social media for their news; more than 60% of Peruvians get their news from social media …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dominika Betakova, whose interest is in news avoidance – a growing pattern around the world. Such news avoidance is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, though: it may be intentional, or may simply represent a low level of news consumption – and the people who engage in one or the other practice are not necessarily the same.

Intentional news avoidance may be temporal (e.g. during the COVID-19 pandemic), and can lead to better mental health; it can also be related to greater adherence to misbeliefs, a lack of political knowledge, and less political participation …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Ernesto de León; his focus is on hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media. These are all united by an anti-establishment dimension: they peddle misinformation that has a potential to shape public perceptions. Ernesto points here for example to a strange case of such sites promoting stories about elite sportspeople collapsing on the field; they promoted these stories as part of an anti-vaccine campaign claiming (falsely, of course) a connection between such medical cases and their vaccination with the COVID-19 vaccine.

But such content also circulates on non-HAC media sites, and through …

The third speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Michael Hameleers. He begins by highlighting the supposed threat of mis- and disinformation, but also notes that the dissemination of such content is not necessarily very widespread; news users are very concerned about misinformation, however, and about their own susceptibility to such misinformation – they think much of the information they encounter is mis- or disinformation.

This means that we need to focus further on such risk perceptions, and on what groups in society are most likely to hold such perceptions. It seems likely that such perceptions about misinformation are also …