Social Media Analytics in Society and Crisis Communication (RISE_SMA)

Oh dear – it’s been quite a while since I last found the time to update this site with some of my recent presentations and publications. And there’s quite a lot of news, so here’s the first instalment in what’s going to be a series of posts. Working through the last few months chronologically, let’s begin with the conferences of the International Communication Association and Australia New Zealand Communication Association, held (online) in May and July 2021, where my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I presented a number of papers on our current research.

At ICA 2021, I was involved in two presentations. First, with our visiting scholars Magdalena Wischnewski (from the University of Duisburg-Essen’s RISE_SMA research project) and Tobias Keller, I worked on a study of newssharing practices by followers of the far-right conspiracy site InfoWars on Twitter; as I’ve noted in a previous update, that study was also published in the journal Digital Journalism.

Magdalena Wischnewski, Axel Bruns, and Tobias Keller. “Shareworthiness and Motivated Reasoning in Hyper-Partisan News Sharing Behavior on Twitter.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association conference, online, 27-31 May 2021.

Second, with my colleagues Eddy Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington from my current ARC Discovery project Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation I also presented an update on our study of the dissemination of the baseless COVID-19/5G conspiracy theory on social, fringe, and mainstream media, focussing here especially on the fringe and media coverage of this content. I’ll have quite a few more updates on this in further updates, so for now I'll simply include the video – slides and other details at the link below:

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: