‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this rapid ECREA 2024 session is Christian Schwieter, whose focus is on the German news coverage of Telegram as a new and challenging social media platform. Telegram has become a hugely contested object in popular discourse; it has marketed itself as a strongly pro-democracy and pro-free speech platform, but is also accused of allowing hate speech and child abuse materials on its channels – notably Telegram founder Pavel Durov was recently arrested in France for this reason.

Telegram has also become a refuge for the deplatforming, and a space for alternative, conspiracist, and far-right groups. The …

The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session on Telegram are Lars Rinsdorf and Kathrin Müller, whose interest is in hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracist social media spheres. Telegram is a very attractive tool for the publics populating such spheres; it is a hybrid communication platform that is especially well suited to the interests of such publics.

What are the actor identities, communicative practices, and frames of relevance emerging in such (counter)publics? The project explored this through expert interviews pointing researches to relevant topics and channels; then examined some 50 such channels closely through qualitative analysis; gathered some 2,700 posts from …

The first full day at the ECREA 2024 conference begins for me with a panel on Telegram and politics. The first presenter is Corinna Peil, whose interest is in COVID-19 conspiracy narratives on Telegram. How do the people who disseminate such narratives understand content moderation interventions?

Content moderation is a fundamental service that social media platforms provide, but this also generates accusations of censorship; exactly how content moderation works is also a subject of (sometimes conspiracist) ‘folk theories’ about the power and practices of social media platforms, however. The pandemic heightened this further, as it pushed platforms to implement stronger …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …

And the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Victoria O’Meara, whose focus is on the anti-vaccine ‘Children’s Health Defense’ group, founded in 2016 and directed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until 2013; it is a key driver of health-related mis- and disinformation campaigns in the context COVID-19 and beyond.

CHD was identified as a key disinformation superspreader by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and removed from Facebook and Instagram in August 2022 for repeatedly violating its terms of service on misinformation and conspiracy theories. RFK Jr. was similarly deplatforming, but has been reinstated …

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Michael Chan, whose interest is in cross-national misinformation belief and sharing patterns. Mis- and disinformation is a global pattern, but are the motivations for engaging with such content the same across countries? If not, what does the mean for countermeasures against such problematic information?

Cognitive drivers may be intuitive thinking (a lack of analytical thinking or deliberation), cognitive failures (neglecting source cues or counter-evidence), or illusory truth (familiarity, fluency, and cohesion); socio-affective drivers may be source cues, emotion, and worldviews. This paper focusses on the cognitive …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Hazel Kwon, who continues the COVID-19 mis- and disinformation theme. Such conspiracist claims often focussed on powerful actors (politicians and others), and this represents a reductionist worldview; these claims can have very direct material impacts on communities, for instance when they question the established science and promote vaccine hesitancy.

Some such conspiracy theories focussed directly on Bill Gates and his foundation’s work on vaccination; the present paper examines the superspreaders of such ideas on Twitter during the last three quarters of 2020. Tweets were linked to major …

It’s a suspiciously sunny Wednesday in London, so I must be at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, where I start by chairing a panel on mis-and disinformation. My excellent QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the first presenter, whose paper focusses on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. She starts with conspiracies around the role of Bill and Melinda Gates (and other philanthropists) in global crises – they are often targets of conspiracy theories which claim that they had a role in secret plots to create such crises.

Conspiracy theories can be understood as presenting webs of floating signifiers, enabling a politics …