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 [10], 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 that the coronavirus was engineered as a bioweapon, as well as pushing a range of other conspiracy theories. The full report [11] is out now – and here’s the press release [12] from the Centre for Responsible Technology.

Further, I also spoke about this and related research as part of an online panel discussion organised by the University of Queensland Art Museum. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touched on the spread of COVID-related ‘fake news’, the question of how platforms, regulators, and the general public should respond to such mis- and disinformation, and the need for much more (and much more interdisciplinary) research in this area. Here’s the full video:

We Need To Talk About...COVID-19, the media and fake news [13] from UQ Art Museum [14] on Vimeo [15].

In addition to all this, there’s quite a bit more work in the pipeline. I’ll have another update soon on our paper and video presentation for the (online) Social Media & Society 2020 conference [16], starting in a couple of days, which examines the question of whether ‘fake’ news really disseminates more quickly on Twitter than ‘real’ news (spoiler: it doesn’t), and another forthcoming article that examines the spread of those crazy COVID/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook. More on those soon!