The COVID-19 online edition of the wonderful Social Media & Society conference has just started, and my colleague Tobias Keller and I are presenting our latest research via a YouTube video that has now been released. In our study we examine the average dissemination curves for news articles from mainstream and fringe news sources; this analysis is prompted by the persistent media framing of past research as (supposedly) showing that ‘fake news’ disseminates more quickly than ‘real news’.
Leaving aside such disputed labels, we find no evidence of any systematic differences in dissemination speeds on Twitter: during 2019, for …
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 …
