In a guest blog post, Jennifer Forestal summarizes her new book, Designing for Democracy, out now in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.
Read MoreMy Loughborough colleague James Stanyer and I have a new article out in Communication Theory: Deception as a Bridging Concept in the Study of Disinformation, Misinformation, and Misperceptions: Toward a Holistic Framework.
The origins of this piece go back to conversations we started having a couple of years ago about the curious lack of attention to deception in the research on misinformation, disinformation, and misperceptions.
Read MoreGuest Annelise Russell writes about her new book, Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter, out now in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.
Read MoreI have a new study, co-authored with O3C comrades Cristian Vaccari and Johannes Kaiser: The Amplification of Exaggerated and False News on Social Media: The Roles of Platform Use, Motivations, Affect, and Ideology. Forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist.
Read MoreI have a new piece, out today in The Conversation, pondering how new social norms appear to be diffusing, reducing Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy.
Read MoreThe latest study from the OCEANS vaccine hesitancy project is out today in The Lancet Public Health. With OCEANS III, we developed ten different information messages and tested their impact on vaccine hesitancy. To do this, we held a randomized controlled trial involving 18,885 UK adults.
The findings surprised us.
Read MoreThe second study from the OCEANSII vaccine hesitancy project is out in Social Media & Society. The article is open access and free. Read a summary and download the accepted manuscript here.
Read MoreGuests Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe write about their new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency, now published in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.
Read MoreSince the summer, I've been part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by Daniel Freeman, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University, examining COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the UK. We have a new, peer-reviewed, article out in Psychological Medicine from December 11, 2020.
Read MoreWe are recruiting a full-time postdoctoral researcher, funded for three years as part of an exciting new Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant. We also have a three year funded PhD studentship.
Read MoreEllen Watts and I I have just completed a new book chapter that is forthcoming in a volume edited by Rebecca Lind at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the third in her series Produsing Theory in a Digital World.
Read MoreI’m excited to announce three new titles in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series:
Sarah Sobieraj’s Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy.
Jack Parkin’s Money Code Space: Hidden Power in Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Decentralisation.
Rachel K. Gibson’s When the Nerds Go Marching In: How Digital Technology Moved from the Margins to the Mainstream of Political Campaigns.
You can read more about these books at the OUP website by clicking on the covers below. Or you can visit the series homepage.
Catherine R. Baker and I have just completed a new article: “Corrupted Infrastructures of Meaning: Post-truth Identities Online.”
The piece is a contribution to Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord’s exciting new edited volume, The Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation and Populism, which is forthcoming with Routledge. We develop a conceptual framework for examining how post-truth identities are developed and maintained online. Part of our task involves defining what post-truth identities are, and how they are the result of a confluence of cognitive biases at the individual level and a range of media system factors. We illustrate these conceptual themes with discussion of three cases: ‘anti-vaxxers,’ ‘flat earthers,’ and ‘incels.’
Read MoreCristian Vaccari and I have a new article out in Social Media and Society. For this study, we designed a survey experiment to assess the impact of exposure to three different cuts we made of Buzzfeed’s famous 2018 Barack Obama “educational” deepfake video, featuring Obama and the actor and director Jordan Peele. We embedded the experiment as a realistic Youtube video at the end of a survey of an online sample representative of the UK adult population based on age, gender, and region of residence (N=2,005). Our main foci were deception and trust. The study also featured in the Washington Post.
Read MoreLast November I was fortunate enough to have a wide-ranging, deeply engaging conversation with Professor Adrienne Russell about the present crisis of public communication. Adrienne is Mary Laird Wood Professor of Communication at the University of Washington.
Here's what we discussed.
Read MoreI have a new article out, which I've published as a free O3C paper.
Titled ‘The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics,’ this 8,000-word essay collects my thoughts from the last two years about where we've been and where we're heading (and ought to be heading) in research on digital media and politics.
If you’ve been to one of my talks over the last couple of years you'll recognize these ideas and how they’ve been important in the foundation of O3C at Loughborough.
Read MoreToday sees the publication of a new survey report examining problematic news sharing on UK social media, which I co-authored with Cristian Vaccari.
Read MoreI recently wrote an article about the UK Government’s new Online Harms White Paper.
Read MoreI wrote a review for International Journal of Press/Politics of Brian Southwell, Emily A. Thorson, and Laura Sheble’s timely new edited collection, Misinformation and Mass Audiences.
Read MoreOver the last nine months I've led the development of a new MA programme in Social Media and Political Communication at Loughborough. We are now accepting applications for the first group of students. The programme begins October 2019.
Read MoreI'm Professor of Political Communication in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture and the School of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, where I also direct the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C).
I'm Professor of Political Communication in the Department of Communication and Media at Loughborough University, where I am also director of the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C).
The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power is published by Oxford University Press and is now in its second edition. It was awarded the Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association Information Technology and Politics Section and the International Journal of Press/Politics Best Book Award.
Banner photos: © Andrew Chadwick
