Gresham College Lecture, May 5 - Breaking Democracy: Lies, Deception and Disinformation
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On May 5 I’ll be giving a Gresham Lecture at Gresham College in central London.
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Covid misinformation is a health risk—Tech companies need to remove harmful content, not tweak their algorithms. (new from me in The Conversation)
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I have a new piece out today in The Conversation, outlining my critique of the Royal Society’s new report, The Online Information Environment.
Read MoreGuest Post: Hyunjin Seo on her new book, Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment
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In the latest Guest Author post, Hyunjin Seo, Oscar Stauffer Professor of Journalism at the University of Kansas, writes about her new book Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment, out now in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.
Read MoreGuest Post: Jennifer Forestal writes about her new book Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments
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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 MoreNew Journal Article—“Deception as a Bridging Concept in the Study of Disinformation, Misinformation, and Misperceptions”—Out Now in Communication Theory
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My 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 Post: Annelise Russell on her new book, Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter
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Guest 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 MoreNew Journal Article: The Amplification of Exaggerated and False News on Social Media: The Roles of Platform Use, Motivations, Affect, and Ideology
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I 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 MoreWhy Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Should Fall as More People Get the Jab - (new piece in The Conversation)
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I have a new piece, out today in The Conversation, pondering how new social norms appear to be diffusing, reducing Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy.
Read MoreNew Study from the OCEANS Project: Effects of Different Types of Written Vaccination Information on Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in the UK (OCEANS-III): A Randomised Controlled Trial
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The 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 MoreNew article: Online Social Endorsement and Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in the UK
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The 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 MoreGuest Post: Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe on their new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency
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Guests Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe write about their new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency, now published in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.
Read MoreNew Article in Psychological Medicine: Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in the UK
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Since 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 MoreUPDATED: RA Job and funded PhD: New three-year Postdoc and PhD studentship at O3C Loughborough - Understanding the Everyday Sharing of Misinformation on Private Social Media
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We 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 MoreUpdated: New article: "'With and Between You All': Celebrity Status, User-Audience Networks, and Representative Claims in Emma Watson’s Feminist Politics"
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Ellen 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 MoreThree New Books in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics Book Series
/I’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.
New Piece: Corrupted Infrastructures of Meaning: Post-truth Identities Online
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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 MoreNew article: Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News
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Cristian 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 MoreNew: Coming to Terms with Dysfunctional Hybridity: A Conversation with Andrew Chadwick on the Challenges to Liberal Democracy in the Second-wave Networked Era
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Last 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 MoreNew Article: The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics
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I 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 MoreNew O3C Survey Report: News Sharing on UK Social Media: Misinformation, Disinformation & Correction
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Today sees the publication of a new survey report examining problematic news sharing on UK social media, which I co-authored with Cristian Vaccari.
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