The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.
Here are the slides for this presentation, and my liveblog of Dan’s presentation follows below:
Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.
On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk, available below, also gave me an opportunity to speak more generally about the continued challenges of researching social media platforms and their activities, and to outline some of the work that my colleagues and I in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are doing to address these issues. The audio on the recording is a little soft, but I hope the overall discussion comes through clearly enough; slides and further details are linked below.
A few days later I gave a talk to the Social Media Data Science Group at the University of Sydney – many thanks to Monika Bednarek for the invitation. This was a great opportunity for me to step through a number of different, related concepts from groups through communities to publics, and organise some thoughts on how to distinguish these broadly similar but nonetheless distinct formations from one another. This is important especially in the context of network analysis, which all too often jumps to calling collections of similar entities a ‘community’ without paying sufficient attention to the specific meaning of that term: not every cluster is necessarily a community in the proper sense of the word.
In July 2021, I was exceptionally honoured to be awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship: a five-year, A$3.5 million research grant that represents the highest level of individual recognition by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Laureate Fellowships are exceedingly rare – no more than 17 are awarded each year, and they go very predominantly to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; indeed, as far as I can tell, mine was the first awarded to a researcher from the Media and Communication field in the 13 years of the scheme’s existence.
Most importantly, the Laureate Fellowship enables me to build a team of four Postdoctoral Research Associates (five-year, full-time postdoctoral positions) and four PhD researchers (three-year PhD scholarships) starting in early 2022, plus another four PhD positions to follow mid-project, in 2024. The whole team will be based with me and our excellent community of research staff and students at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane, Australia. If these positions are of interest to you, read on (and if you know of others who might be interested, please share this information with them)…
Commencing formally in February 2022, my Laureate project addresses the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation in online communication. It continues a trajectory of recent work that began with my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, which in turn sparked the 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real? that examined in some more detail whether there was any evidence for the claims that ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ were increasingly enclosing us all in ideologically pure information environments on digital and social media platforms. (Spoiler: there wasn’t.)
I ended that book with a call to action: if the problem wasn’t simply technological (‘social media create filter bubbles’), then what is driving the increase in hyperpartisanship and polarisation that we seem to be experiencing in many countries around the world? Indeed, stepping back a little further from that premise, is polarisation actually increasing? Can we use digital trace data to assess this, and systematically compare such assessments over time (to measure the speed of change) and across national contexts (to examine whether some political and media systems are more resilient than others)?
I’ve also outlined my path towards these questions, and the Laureate Fellowship, in my recent QUTeX talk during the ADM+S News & Media Symposium – I hope this provides a useful introduction to these concerns, and overview of my research agenda from here (there’s also a follow-up post on the QUTeX blog):
In the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, I lead the Digital Publics programme – a growing collective of researchers who study the role of mainstream and social media as spaces for public communication. Over the past few years, this has necessarily required a particular focus on the dark sides of online communication, from the role of social, fringe, and mainstream media in the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories through the continuing transformation of the journalism industry to the problematic role of platform operators in shaping the environments for public communication. And these are just the major themes of my own work – my excellent colleagues in the Digital Publics programme are exploring an even broader and more diverse range of research agendas.
To present a detailed overview of our current work, we are presenting a one-day Digital Publics Symposium on 17 November 2021, under the general heading of Information Disorders. Opening with a keynote by renowned disinformation researcher Kate Starbird from the University of Washington, the Symposium features research by DMRC researchers covering a wide range of current concerns, from large-scale studies of the dissemination of ‘fake news’ content on major social media platforms to detailed forensic analysis of specific issues and events, and from innovative computational methods for the analysis of problematic communicative patterns to in-depth conceptual considerations of possible responses to such information disorders.
If you’re able to join us in Brisbane for the Symposium, we would love to welcome you at QUT; for everyone else, we invite you to follow the proceedings and engage with the discussion through out livestream of the event. Click on the image below to find out more about the Symposium, to see the event programme, and to register as an online or in-person attendee:
Last week saw the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which also marked the end of my six-year tenure on the AoIR Executive (serving two years each as Vice-President, President, and Past President). AoIR remains my intellectual home, and I’ve had a great time in these roles, even in spite of the additional pressure that these past two pandemic years and the resulting need to move our annual conference to an entirely online format have provided – I’ve worked with three excellent Executive Committees, and I’m particularly proud of the way that we didn’t just move the conference online, but created what has become a benchmark for many other online conferences. My sincere thanks to everyone who has served with me on the Exec over these six years – and with first Tama Leaver and then Nicholas A. John taking on the AoIR Presidency over the coming two terms, I know the Association is in very good hands as we return towards in-person events again, too.
But on to this year’s AoIR conference. I ended up being involved in quite a number of panels, drawing on the excellent and diverse research conducted by my colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and collaborating with a range of colleagues from around the world. As the AoIR conference presentation videos themselves will be taken down again by the end of the year, we’ve now made these available via the DMRC YouTube channel, too – and since there’s only so much we can cover in AoIR’s three-minute presentation format, we’ve also recorded longer-form videos for a number of the papers on these panels. For more details on any of these presentations, click on the reference below the video.
Mis- and Disinformation
I’ll start with a panel on mis- and disinformation that is closely related to our current ARC Discovery project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation. This bumper panel of five presentations brings together a large-scale study of suspected ‘fake news’ dissemination networks on Facebook over the past five years with detailed analysis of sharing and engagement patterns around two specific problematic outlets – the Russian state propaganda channel RT and the controversial commercial news channel Sky News Australia; it further combines this analysis of mis- and disinformation practices with two papers reviewing the discourse about ‘fake news’ and related phenomena in Australian media and politics, and in the Russian and Persian Twitterspheres. I must say I’m particularly excited about this panel also because it showcases the breadth and depth of the research being conducted at the DMRC and our partner institutions, and the diversity of our researchers – the RT paper alone covers content in English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and I can’t think of too many other research centres that can readily assemble such a multi-lingual team.
Of the papers presented in the panel, we’ve recoded longer versions for two. The first of these is our large-scale, longitudinal study of ‘fake news’ sharing on Facebook. This draws on our masterlist of some 2,300+ outlets suspected of publishing mis- and disinformation, which we’ve compiled from the existing literature; we’ve gathered any posts that share links to these sites on public Facebook pages and groups, and mapped the networks between these Facebook spaces. The results are indicative of the key groups and communities, from around the world, that are involved in promoting such problematic information, and of the themes they tend to focus on – and they’re a starting point for the next stage of the work in our ARC Discovery project. Here is the long version of the presentation:
Here’s the next instalment of my blog posts as I continue to work through my backlog of research updates – it’s been a big year, and it looks like there will be a fair few further posts to come. In this one I’ll focus on the European Communication Conference (ECREA), which was held online in September this year.
My own major contribution was another paper on the myth of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, reviewing the evidence and debunking the simplistic claims about the damaging effects that these phenomena are supposed to have. Here’s a video of the presentation, and more details are at the link below.
I’ve expanded on this discussion in a new book chapter in the excellent new collection Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society, edited by Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo – many thanks to them both for the invitation to contribute a chapter. This provides a condensed version of the argument against ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and instead encourages us to look for the other, social and societal rather than technological factors driving hyperpartisanship and polarisation. (I’ll have more to say on the research agenda required to do so in a future post.) Here’s the book chapter as a pre-print, and the full book is now also available:
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