I’ve mentioned some of these here before, but I’m very happy to say that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Edward Hurcombe, Stephen Harrington, and I have now completed our trilogy of articles that investigated the dissemination of the baseless and nonsensical conspiracy theory that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow related to 5G mobile telephony technology from its origins in obscure conspiracist sites and groups through social and fringe media to mainstream coverage. For a while, such dissemination was so widespread that it even resulted in physical attacks against mobile phone towers and technicians in the UK and elsewhere, in April 2020, and was covered in an episode of the investigative TV programme Four Corners on Australian television (though the eventual episode provide far too much of a platform for the conspiracy theorists themselves to spread their disinformation, unfortunately).

We divided our work on this topic into three segments: our first article, published in Media International Australia in August 2020, examined the dissemination of the conspiracy theory in its constantly evolving forms through public pages and groups on Facebook; here, we observed a number of phase shifts in the transmission of these ideas as they were amplified by increasingly visible and influential participants and communities. A second article, published in Digital Journalism in September 2021, complemented this analysis by examining the fringe and mainstream media coverage of the conspiracy theory, and showed the parallel evolution of that coverage from minor conspiracy-friendly sites through uncritical entertainment and tabloid media coverage to mainstream media reporting. Finally, our book chapter in the excellent new collection Communicating COVID-19, edited by Monique Lewis, Eliza Govender, and Kate Holland, has just been released, and examines these parallels between the social, fringe, and mainstream media coverage. It points especially to the weak spots in journalistic coverage – uncritical entertainment and tabloid reporting that treats celebrities as ready sources of clickbait without considering the damage that such coverage can do – that enable conspiracy theories to travel beyond their obscure communities of true believers, and makes a number of critical observations that should be considered by the journalists, platform operators, and authorities forced to engage with such mis- and disinformation.

Here are those three articles, then – click on each title for a pre-print version, or on the publications for the final published result: