• I recently completed an article commissioned by Zizi Papacharissi for her new edited book, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Democracy. It’s a future-oriented theory and overview piece that takes stock of the development of the research over the last 25 years or so. It’s titled ‘What is Gone and What Remains in the Research on Digital Engagement?’ I made the final mix shortly after the U.S. election result. You can download a preprint here.

  • New journal articles and a public report from O3C’s Leverhulme-funded project Understanding the Everyday Sharing of Misinformation, hot off the press:

    • Lawson, B. T., Chadwick, A., Hall, N-A., & Vaccari, C. (2025). The Trustworthiness of Peers and Public Discourse: Exploring How People Navigate Numerical Dis/misinformation on Personal Messaging Platforms. Information, Communication & Society, 28(4), 633–650. (Download pdf).

    • Chadwick, A., Hall, N-A., & Vaccari, C. (2025). Misinformation Rules!? Could “Group Rules” Reduce Misinformation in Online Personal Messaging? New Media & Society. (Download pdf).

    • Chadwick, A., Vaccari, C., & Hall, N-A. (2024). What Explains the Spread of Misinformation in Online Personal Messaging Networks? Exploring the Role of Conflict Avoidance. Digital Journalism. (Download pdf).

    • Hall, N-A., Hall, N-A., Chadwick, A., Vaccari, C., Lawson, B., & Akolgo, P. (2024). Research Update: Misinformation on Personal Messaging—Are WhatsApp’s Warnings Effective? Online Civic Culture Centre, Loughborough University. 28pp. (Press release) (Download pdf).

    • Hall, N-A., Chadwick, A., & Vaccari, C. (2023). Online Misinformation and Everyday Ontological Narratives of Social Distinction. Media, Culture & Society. (Download pdf).

  • In the Spring of 2024, I was an invited adviser to a government Rapid Project on Deepfakes and Media Literacy. Meeting notes from the roundtable held as part of the project, chaired by Tom Crick (Chief Scientific Adviser, DCMS) and facilitated by the UK Government Office for Science, have now (May 2025) been published on the Government’s website.

  • I contributed (unpaid) to the White Paper on political honesty formally discussed on November 25 in the Welsh Senedd. It was prepared by the Institute for Constitutional and Democratic Research (ICDR), a non-partisan body of lawyers and academics that engages with select committee and public inquiries as well as officials in Westminster, the devolved legislatures and executives, and local government. I was a member of ICDR’s nine-member Working Group, which was established in the summer of 2024. The Group developed a model regulatory proposal for the Senedd's Standards Committee to inform the Welsh Government's plan for a new law whereby politicians or candidates who are found by an independent judicial process to have deliberately lied and failed to correct the public record when formally given the opportunity will be disqualified from office. The White Paper developed an “in principle” model, which can be applied in either a civil law or criminal law context. It was formally presented to the Welsh Senedd in November, 2024. In February 2025, the Senedd’s Standards Committee published its final report and recommendations. There is still a long way to go, and it looks increasingly like the framework will not be in place in time for the 2026 Senedd elections, but the Committee adopted most of the ICDR’s recommendations. The Senedd’s press release is available here and the Standards Committee’s full report is here; the summary of recommendations is on pages 7–9.

  • During the 2024 UK general election campaign I worked with the Investigations team at ABC News to provide data analysis and contextual commentary in the week leading up to the broadcaster's scoop uncovering a coordinated foreign disinformation campaign targeting UK citizens on Facebook. The investigation resulted in statements by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and former Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden and an ongoing investigation by the National Security Online Information Team in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The revelations featured on the front page of The Sunday Times and in further follow-up stories in The Times, the Daily Mail, Sky News, the Independent, and the Evening Standard, among several other outlets. After publication of ABC's article, Meta issued a statement saying it had taken down the pages and their paid advertisements for “inauthentic behaviour deceiving people.” I was later interviewed by Germany’s main public news organization ARD-aktuell about my own further cross-platform investigation, which found that the racist, anti-immigrant accounts in the disinformation network on Facebook were also active on X/Twitter and targeting the UK and French elections.

  • The latest three titles in my book series Oxford Studies in Digital Politics are Meredith D. Clark (2025). We Tried to Tell Y'All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives; Leticia Bode & Emily K. Vraga (2025) Observed Correction: How We Can All Respond to Misinformation on Social Media, and Robert Gorwa (2024) The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation. More details here.

  • In the latest UK Research Excellence Framework (2021), Communication and Media at Loughborough was ranked 5th in the UK and submitted 40 full-time staff. Overall, 92% of its research was ranked in the two highest categories—'world leading' and 'internationally excellent'—with 65% ranked world leading: the highest possible award of 4 stars. Its research environment and research impact were each ranked joint 1st place in the UK, with the highest possible award of 100% 4-star quality.

    [Page updated June, 2025]

Banner photo: View from the London Eye