For those of you who have access to Australian television, this is an advance warning that the research on coronavirus-related mis- and disinformation that my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have conducted during the first half of this year will be featured prominently in tonight’s episode of the ABC’s investigative journalism programme Four Corners, which focusses on 5G conspiracy theories. A preview is below, and I hope that the full programme may also become available without geoblocking on ABC iView or the Four Corners Facebook page. The accompanying ABC News article has further information, too.

Related to this work, and the ARC Discovery research project that supports it, we are now also calling for expressions of interest in a three-year PhD scholarship on mis- and disinformation in social media, which will commence in early 2021. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested in the scholarship:

PhD Scholarship: ARC Discovery project on Mis- and Disinformation in Social Media (PhD commencing 2021)

The QUT Digital Media Research Centre is offering a three-year PhD scholarship associated with a major ARC Discovery research project on mis- and disinformation in social media. Working with DMRC research leaders Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and Dan Angus, and collaborating with Scott Wright (Monash University, Melbourne), Jenny Stromer-Galley (Syracuse University, USA), and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff University, UK), the PhD researcher will use qualitative and quantitative analytics methods to investigate the dissemination patterns and processes for mis- and disinformation.

I’ve been working from home since mid-March now, but the research continues even if remotely. Here are some more updates on the latest outputs.

First, in addition to our ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar, my QUT colleague Tim Graham and I (with support from our research assistant Guangnan Zhu and Rod Campbell from the Australia Institute) have now also published a report for the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology that investigates the presence of coordinated activity on Twitter in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. We find evidence of coordinated networks of accounts promoting the false claim that the coronavirus was engineered as a bioweapon, as well as pushing a range of other conspiracy theories. The full report is out now – and here’s the press release from the Centre for Responsible Technology.

Further, I also spoke about this and related research as part of an online panel discussion organised by the University of Queensland Art Museum. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touched on the spread of COVID-related ‘fake news’, the question of how platforms, regulators, and the general public should respond to such mis- and disinformation, and the need for much more (and much more interdisciplinary) research in this area. Here’s the full video:

We Need To Talk About...COVID-19, the media and fake news from UQ Art Museum on Vimeo.