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.’

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.

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.

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.

Today sees the publication of a new survey report examining problematic news sharing on UK social media, which I co-authored with Cristian Vaccari.

I 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.

On October 11 I’ll be giving the keynote at this year’s International Journal of Press/Politics conference.

This one-hour talk was based on the analysis in the new chapter on the 2016 presidential campaign in the second edition of The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power.

Next week I’ll be giving a keynote at the Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference at the University of Tartu, Estonia.