[Air-L] CFP: Understanding the spread of misinformation in the Australian and US media fields

[Robert Ackland]

<on behalf of mathieu.oneil at canberra.edu.au> <apologies for multiple posts>
*CFP: Understanding the spread of misinformation in the Australian and 
US media fields*
****
*Concepts and Methods Symposium*
****
**News & Media Research Centre
University of Canberra
Friday 7 September 2018


*Networked misinformation*
****
**Growing fragmentation in media systems has resulted in dramatically 
increased choice for media consumers. This process has been accelerated 
by the growth of digital platforms for news and information which open 
media spaces not only to a wider diversity of outlets but also to 
foreign and domestic information operations: strategic actors can sow 
disinformation relatively covertly, distancing their activities from 
their foreign or domestic patrons.

We distinguish misinformation - the accidental statement of factually 
incorrect claims - from disinformation, which is strategic or 
intentional. To what extent are these activities enabled by the 
affordances of social media such as 'echo chambers' (media environments 
where people only connect with like-minded others) and 'filter bubbles' 
(resulting from media content being algorithmically selected to match 
previous consumer choices)?

There has been much empirical debate as to the existence of echo 
chambers and filter bubbles. To the extent they exist, both phenomena 
result in media consumers being exposed to information that reinforces 
previously held beliefs. The disappearance of attitude-challenging 
content and attendant rise of misinformed opinion is thought to have 
played a role in the 2016 US Presidential election, where information 
untethered to reality (see for example ‘Pizzagate’) spread amongst some 
Republican Party supporter networks.

Whether they are used by strategic actors seeking to achieve political 
objectives or not, echo chambers and filter bubbles challenge the 
functioning of the news media as a public sphere where the informed 
confrontation of contrasting viewpoints can lead to common understanding 
and agreement about what exists, and what matters. The consequences are 
profound: we may be arriving at a cultural moment where a significant 
part of the population no longer believes that facts are knowable.

*Symposium aims and submissions*
****
**Are echo chambers and filter bubbles real? If they are real, to what 
extent do they contribute to the spread of misinformation? Are 
‘filter-bursting’ strategies available? What’s it like in there, anyway? 
Are journalists part of the problem, or are they the solution? If 
journalists in the US and UK failed to anticipate Brexit and the 
election of Donald Trump because of filter bubbles and echo chambers, is 
the Australian journalistic field similarly afflicted?

The Understanding the spread of misinformation in the Australian and US 
media fields Symposium will bring together journalists and researchers, 
cutting-edge computational methods and first-hand accounts of actors in 
the field, to assess to what extent filter bubbles and echo chambers 
contribute to the spread of misinformation.

Please send 500-word abstract of presentations to 
*mathieu.oneil at canberra.edu.au* by 31 May 2018. Suitable presentations 
will be invited to contribute to a journal special issue.

Researchers and journalists are encouraged to address questions 
including, but not limited to:

*Are there echo chambers, filter bubbles and fake-news spreading hubs in 
the Australian media field?
*Comparative approaches: misinformation and disinformation in the 
Australian and US media fields, and beyond.
*How are foreign or domestic strategic actors using media spaces and to 
what extent and through what mechanisms are they impacting news reporting?
*Is Australia at risk of being swamped by ‘fake news’? Why or why not?
*Bubbles in the eye of the beholder: when does a belief become a 
conspiracy?
*Do the specific features of the Australian media field (duopolistic 
structure, late arrival of Cable News, public broadcasting) affect the 
spread of misinformation?
*What steps are journalists taking to counter the impact of social media 
on meaningful democratic deliberation?
*How can confirmation bias (biased information confirming previously 
held beliefs as plausible) be addressed?
*Is the rejection of professional journalism and expertise, common among 
populists who have emerged in response to neoliberalism, limited to 
certain sectors of the ideological spectrum? Why or why not?
*Does focusing on algorithmic filtering obscures other processes 
detrimental to democratic politics? Additional factors may have played a 
key role in the 2016 US election, such as the manipulation of 
recommendation systems through the exploitation of so-called 
‘click-workers’ and ‘like farms’, often located in poor countries 
(Casilli, 2016). In 2015 it was estimated that 58% of the accounts which 
‘liked’ Donald Trump’s Facebook page were fake, for example (Brown, 2015).


*Organising committee*
****
**Mathieu O’Neil, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra
Michael Jensen, Institute for Policy and Governance Analysis, University 
of Canberra
Robert Ackland, Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks 
(VOSON) Lab, Australian National University
Amy Remeikis, Political Reporter, The Guardian Australia


*Background*
****
**The loss of a common political discourse resulting from a fragmenting 
of the online population into narrowly-focused groups of individuals 
solely exposed to information confirming previously held opinions and 
biases was first referred to as ‘echo chambers’ by Sunstein (2001) 
whilst Van Alstyne & Brynjolfsson (2005) described a process of 
‘cyber-balkanisation’. This fragmentation facilitates the seeding of 
misinformation by strategic actors to sympathetic audiences, who are 
more likely to believe claims not on the basis of factual predicates, 
but on that of their resonance to their identity (Miskimmon et al. 2013, 
Benkler et al. 2017).

However, while the concept of the filter bubble is widespread, there is 
scant empirical evidence for the existence and impact of filter bubbles 
with many researchers simply assuming that filter bubbles exist, and 
that something needs to be done about them. Filter bubbles almost bear 
the hallmarks of a ‘moral panic’, with social scientists, computer 
scientists and engineers vying to provide solutions to a phenomenon that 
is yet to be properly explored and understood. The limited research that 
is relevant to filter bubbles has tended to involve either surveys of 
social media users (‘where do you get your news?’) or analysis of ‘big 
data’ collected unobtrusively from social media. Big data studies and 
network analysis tend to provide support for the filter bubble thesis 
while survey-based research tends to discount it. Nielsen (2016) uses 
data from the 2015 Reuters Institute Digital News Report to argue that 
‘social media users in fact use significantly more different sources of 
news than non-users’. Similarly, a more recent study reveals that social 
media use tend to diversify news consumers’ diet rather than narrow it 
(Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017).

The research on the drivers of networked misinformation such as echo 
chambers and filter bubbles can be advanced in several ways. First, this 
research usually pertains to the perils posed by online echo chambers to 
general users. Less attention has been paid to how such phenomena, when 
operating in influential sectors of society such as the journalistic 
field, can be detrimental to the plural public discourse that is 
essential to democracy. Second, this research deals with very general 
notions such as ‘the Internet’, ‘social media’, or ‘Twitter’, obviating 
the fact that not only are there ‘online spaces which develop 
distinctive and well-ordered cultures’ (Hine 2015: 38), but that these 
online spaces are frequently embedded in highly distinctive offline 
locales. Finally, research on filter bubbles has tended to eschew 
consideration of a key behaviour that contribute to these phenomena: how 
people engage with news.


*References*
****
**Benkler, Y., Faris, R., Roberts, H., & Zuckerman, E. (2017). Study: 
Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda. 
Columbia Journalism Review, March 3.
Brown, J. (2015). There's something odd about Donald Trump's Facebook 
page. Business Insider, June 18. 
<http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-facebook-followers-2015-6?IR=T>
Casilli, A. (2016). Never mind the algorithms: the role of exploited 
digital labor and global click farms in Trump’s election. 
<http://www.casilli.fr/2016/11/20/never-mind-the-algorithms-the-role-of-exploited-digital-labor-and-global-click-farms-in-trumps-election/>
Fletcher, R. & Nielsen, R.K. (2017). Using social media appears to 
diversify your news diet, not narrow it. Nieman Lab. 
<http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/using-social-media-appears-to-diversify-your-news-diet-not-narrow-it/>
Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Menczer, F. (2017). Misinformation on social media: Can technology save 
us? The Conversation. 
<http://theconversation.com/misinformation-on-social-media-can-technology-save-us-69264>
Miskimmon, A., O'Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2013). Strategic 
Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. Routledge, New 
York.
Nielsen, R. K. (2016). 
<https://rasmuskleisnielsen.net/2016/11/25/is-social-media-use-associated-with-more-or-less-diverse-news-use/>
Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is 
Changing What We Read and How We Think, Penguin Press.
Sunstein, C. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Van Alstyne, M. & Brynjolfsson, E. (2005). Global village or 
cyber-balkans? Modeling and measuring the integration of electronic 
communities. Management Science, 51, 851–868.

-- 

Dr Robert Ackland
Associate Professor, School of Sociology
Leader, Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab 
<http://vosonlab.net>
The Australian National University