New Journal Article—“Deception as a Bridging Concept in the Study of Disinformation, Misinformation, and Misperceptions”—Out Now in Communication Theory

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New Journal Article—“Deception as a Bridging Concept in the Study of Disinformation, Misinformation, and Misperceptions”—Out Now in Communication Theory

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.

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New 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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New 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

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.

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Three New Books in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics Book Series

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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.’

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New article: Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News

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New article: Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News

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.

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New: 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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New: Coming to Terms with Dysfunctional Hybridity: A Conversation with Andrew Chadwick on the Challenges to Liberal Democracy in the Second-wave Networked Era

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.

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New Article: The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics

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New Article: The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics

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.

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