 Welcome to the Center for Computational and Data Sciences virtual speaker series. Before I introduce Axl I want to mention that we have two upcoming talks and this year's theme has to do with computational political research. And so, so it's, that's a loose kind of bucket so most of our topics are going to be kind of in that ballpark. The next speaker is Heather Evans. It's going to be October 22nd. And then the one after that is Anders Olaf Larson. And so I'm going to be sending out invites for these talks in the next week or so. Today I'm delighted to introduce Dr. Dr. Axel Bruins, whose talk is titled from the fringes to the mainstream, how coven 19 conspiracy theories spread across social and mainstream media. Axel is an Australian Research Council laureate fellow and professor in digital media research center at Queensland University of technology and Brisbane, Australia. He's joining us, many, many different time zones away. He is a chief investigator of the ARC Center for of excellence for automated decision making and society, and has among his publications, two books I highly recommend one is called our filter levels real. And the other, which is kind of near and dear to me since I study gatekeeping is gate watching and news curation journalism social media and the public sphere. I've known Alex for about a decade and I've always found interesting and useful tidbits in his research talks. So I know I'm going to enjoy this and I hope you do too so help me welcome Axel Bruins. Well, thank you very much for that kind introduction, Jeff. And yeah, it's, it's great to see you and it's great to see everyone, at least in this way. I said earlier will be great to come and visit you at some point as well but that's probably still some time away so this is the the next best I guess that we can do. Let me start by sharing my screen here so we can get going. And I'm hoping that you can see the slides. So, yeah, so, so yes, thank you again for the invitation. I'll say to that what I'm presenting here is is really work that I've done with my colleagues Edward Herkham and Stephen Harrington in our center as well. So, yeah, they played a really vital role in doing this research as well. Before I get started, let me just acknowledge, as we do here in Australia, the traditional owners of the lands upon upon upon which I work and live. It's a terrible and younger people here in Brisbane as the First Nations owners of these lands to pay respect to their elders laws customs and creation spirits and recognize that these unseated lands have always been places of teaching research and learning. And I acknowledge the important role that our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still play within the community. Okay, so what I want to talk about is of course this flood of miss and disinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The UN as you probably know has begun to talk about an infodemic alongside the viral pandemic since really March last year since early last year. It's been very widely recognized that there is a very substantial amount of miss and disinformation floating around of course in relation to the pandemic. Now, what shape that takes is sometimes as simple as this. This is from the rapper with Khalifa, who just put out a post on Facebook at some point saying well is it Corona is at 5g you're both you know what what really is behind all of this. And this is really just the very tip of the icebergs I'm not trying to point to him particularly as a source of miss or disinformation but this is how far it travels and how visible these questions and, you know, claims around, you know, the real origins of the pandemic or other aspects of it come and this is what they lead to so in April from April last year we saw attacks on cell towers right across the UK in particular but also in other countries that were very clearly driven by the spread of miss and disinformation particularly around the supposed and entirely incorrect it has to be said I want to make that quite clear links between COVID and 5g wireless technology so people were as you can see there from the image from the New York Times attacking mobile phone towers. They were attacking some of the technicians who were either protecting or maintaining them. So this became not just an online spread of miss and disinformation but it had real physical consequences both in terms of damage to property as well as injury to technicians and so that's how far. And this has has spread. And of course I could cite many more and possibly more substantial problems there as well in relation to other conspiracy theories but this is the one I focus on most. And of course in the end, there's also false reactions from from governments this is advised by the Australian government for instance. And basically warning people of the misinformation around 5g and COVID-19 and circulating and trying to set the record straight, more or possibly less successful. Here in Brisbane, for instance, we've had even marches by anti 5g protesters who, as the, the tweet here says ironically actually gathered in the place where 5g reception so far is best in Brisbane. And this was repeated right around the country and well beyond Australia as well that we have these protesters they sometimes join up of course with other conspiracy theorists and others who are, yeah, talking about the dangers of 5g but here in this example as you can see also I think this to other potentially controversial topics like vaccination and really the pandemic overall and everything to do with it so there's a confluence here of different conspiracy theories different flash points in relation to the pandemic as well that that emerges from all of this. This is a slightly different story but I did want to just share this with you as well. What we've also seen in my colleague Tim Graham here particularly has done some work on this, looking at some of the, the accounts in this case on Twitter that are actively spreading some of this stuff as well and we do see some degree of coordinated activity of course that's pushing some of these conspiracy stories here as well. And in this case, you know we saw the conspiracy that 5g was a bio weapon launched by China particularly pushed by pro Trump accounts. You know that there is not just an organic kind of bubbling up of miss and disinformation but clearly at times this is very actively encouraged and pushed forward by organized campaigns by, you know, by by trolls and particular interest groups as well essentially this is the sort of environment in which this talk really operates, I will focus particularly on the 5g conspiracy theory here because it is simply a very useful case to study this, but I could have picked the bio weapon conspiracy theory and various others as well that that probably would work in a very similar way as well. And of course others have done some of that for this one. So the questions here are, you know, what are the claims they're circulating. How do they evolve over time I guess as well, and who's spreading this. What's the media response in the first place that's a really important aspect I think. So how is this treated in the media, how, how to what extent is it debunked in the media and so on. What about takedowns and other actions against this kind of content or the people who spread it. And what do the official actors do whether that's government authorities, official spokespeople possibly spokespeople for the technology companies, the mobile providers and so on, and medical experts and so on so what's, what's their response. How does that play out, do they respond and perhaps when should they actually be responding to this. Now to do this what we've done in our study is to in the first place generate a data set from Facebook that searched for a bunch of terms related to COVID and 5G. So any posts that we could capture by a crowd tangle, the Facebook data access tool that essentially thematized both the COVID pandemic and 5G. We limited ourselves here for this study to the timeframe from the start of 2020. So well before COVID became a pandemic officially to the middle of April 2020 when the arson attacks in the in the UK had happened. And had spread elsewhere as well. So at that point of course the story really changed to one about the arson attacks particularly. And although arguably in the meantime since then, as that's subsided with, we're seeing a further spread of the 5G conspiracy theories as well so we could really go on until today, of course. Now, as we work with crowd tangle I do need to flag some of the limitations here as well. And those are that crowd tangle provides data only on public pages groups and verified profiles, and to make that a bit easier for me I'll call these public spaces on Facebook for the rest of this talk. Crowd angle data is somewhat different across different countries as well so its coverage is not necessarily quite as good with these public spaces in countries outside of the US, the UK and other major English speaking nations. Facebook itself of course is also used differently and to different extents across different nations so this really is about, you know, the footprint of this conspiracy theory on Facebook rather than the full spread for that we have to look at many other platforms as well. And the way that we gathered data of course used terms in the Latin alphabet so we haven't got data on the spread in other scripts in Cyrillic or Chinese characters Japanese characters and so on. And so this bound to be more spread of these conspiracy theories elsewhere unless of course we have captured them because they happen to use the terms 5G or covered in Latin letters within text in other scripts. And of course in some local languages like Polish here coronavirus spells it with a K and W so we wouldn't pick up on that unless again they used the terms that we're more familiar with in English as well. But overall this is netted us about 90,000 polls for this time period. And as we found there were some false positives there still were for instance there were stories coming out of China about the use of 5G drones to to to disinfect neighborhoods to spray disinfecting across neighborhoods or the the use of 5G in in the hospitals that were being built to treat the COVID and COVID pandemic. So some of these polls have nothing to do with the 5G COVID conspiracy theory itself. But that became very clear from the data analysis ultimately so that's the Facebook data that we're working with. And via the the G Delta database the global database on events locations and topics which is basically a global news database. We searched in a very similar way for content related to COVID and 5G for the same timeframe. The limitation of G Delta is that it doesn't contain the full text of articles and it contains things like the article titles and the article URLs, and that's really what we matched on ultimately. The benefit of that actually is that we are getting articles that very distinctly in their title in the URL address COVID and 5G together. So we're not getting articles where perhaps there is just an incidental mention somewhere of 5G in an article somewhere in the 10th paragraph, but ultimately the article some is about something else. So this is actually not even a particularly significant limitation. It may be quite beneficial for us because we're really getting the articles that are very specifically about this topic. G Delta again has no doubt better coverage in the major languages around the world, particularly in English, but it has in some some much minor languages. Again, we're limited to Latin alphabet and we're not capturing those divergent local terms but overall that gave us 2800 articles again we manually reviewed them and coded them. And after removing those false positives that we saw here as well we had 1800 or so true positives that were so that's the kind of data sets really that I'm working with here. And I'll talk about both of these and the analysis of both of these side by side, although obviously the Facebook data set is larger so I'm going to focus a little bit more on that than on the media side that the media side becomes quite important. So let me point also to the three outputs from this that we have and I can share of course the slide deck with you afterwards as well so you can see these, but essentially the Facebook part of this we published in the journal National Australia, the media coverage that G Delta part we've just published in digital journalism that's just out a couple weeks ago, and then there's a book chapter that's about to come out that basically puts these two together and that's really that the combined analysis is what I will be talking about today. So let me get to that analysis then after that preamble and first off to give you an idea just of the, the overall kind of volume of posts on Facebook at the top there, and G Delta coverage or media coverage at the bottom. And obviously you can see that the Facebook spread of these conspiracy theories does pick up quite a bit earlier than any kind of media coverage does. So, in some ways this is a typical example of conspiracy theory circulating on social media, and then finally being picked up in mainstream media and being addressed in mainstream media and some form. Now, there is a bit more to this though that I'll get to in a moment as well but clearly we're seeing that there is some early circulation on Facebook. In fact, we've broken down the Facebook circulation the pulse per day into five phases that I'm going to step through the very early January phase when nothing much happens then phase in late January to late February, where things are starting to pick up and then you see this kind of ramping up basically through phase three, four, and of course phase five is really when those arson attacks are happening on on the mobile towers in the UK and elsewhere so that's when really actively on Facebook as well as media activity really picks. We've broken it down here by types of pulse on Facebook as well, although there isn't probably all that much to say about this. At this point, other than perhaps that down the track, really from phase four or so onwards we do see perhaps a greater amount of video circulations. So, let me step through the phases then and we start with that phase one that really is throughout January. We're not actually seeing all that much during this time. If you saw the slide before, there's almost a flat line during most of January. What circulates at this point is largely just pre existing claims about 5G. There were of course, people who were warning about the supposed dangers of 5G radiation and so on and before that presumably or 4G and 3G and 2G radiation as well mobile phones well before the pandemic and well before any kind of outbreaks. So, there was some material that was circulating about 5G. Some of this warned more vaguely about pandemics or the, I guess the health risks of 5G that could make people more susceptible to viruses and all these sorts of claims. Again, none of that is true. And I want to make that quite clear. These are genuine conspiracy theories, but these conspiracy theories had been going on about the implication of 5G and potential viral outbreaks for some time. Some of this also overlap with a wide array of other conspiracy theories about vaccines about the world government about chemtrails about everything else that you could mention that you can imagine as conspiracy theories. And then finally, in late January on the 20th of January, this is the first evidence that we find of a genuine direct post genuinely directly linking 5G and COVID together in this French blog action. And then lastly, which I think means the outraged sheep. So they were the first really to talk about what they call their five genocide and the first to claim any kind of relationship between 5G and COVID-19, basically saying that Wuhan was a test region in China for the 5G rollout. And now there's a pandemic so connect the dots essentially is I guess the argument that they're trying to make. Partly because all of this circulated only in French at this point. And partly because these are quite outlandish conspiracy theories this really reached Facebook spaces still with a very limited audience by Facebook standards really spaces with under 100,000 followers generally. And no one covered this in in any kind of media, even the fringe news sites your info wars and others that are actually covered by GDL as well. Did not pick up on this did not cover this in any way so even for them it seems that this was just too outlandish theory to to embrace and partly perhaps it just wasn't on the radar because it wasn't circulating in English. As we move into phase two this really spreads and it builds up from there so the French content appeared then also translated in German on a on an alternative medicine site essentially. And here's a Facebook post that picks up on this and links to it. And again it makes that claim that one was a was a test region for 5G and that therefore it's not a surprise that the pandemic broke out there. As you see there after the fact of course Facebook has now essentially hidden or overlaid this this link with false information warning. So that wouldn't have been there at the time obviously but it does show that some of those warnings that Facebook has introduced for some of these conspiracy theories are now also appearing in this kind of alongside this kind of content although of course you can still click through if you really want to. And as the next step, oddly enough, an English language version of these claims which may have been a more or less direct translation of the German text appeared first in a kpop and forum. Maybe just as an opportunity, because that wasn't moderated or whatever and was easy for something there maybe that that form had been overrun in some form by conspiracy theories I'm not quite sure. That that particular URL is now down so presumably the forum actually has taken it down as well, but this is sort of how it made it its way first into English oddly enough. And then gradually other English language conspiracy pages and sites pick up on this more embellished the story saying that the virus was manufactured in one lab that was activated by 5G or whatever. It actually started to to break out a bit more. Now, oddly enough, around that same time, the UK government also decided to allow the Chinese company Huawei to help build its 5G network so 5G might have been much more visible in English language and that might have actually picked up and help help this story pick up. And there was also a lot of criticism from the US administration towards the UK government at that point because of the concerns about Huawei and that decision was later reversed by the British government as well. So, there was simply a lot of conversation about 5G and it's quite possible that partly because of that, the 5G conspiracy stories also got more visibility as an after effect of that. And gradually now we're seeing the reach grow as well partly because again it makes its way into English language spaces which are possibly larger as well. So 10% of the spaces during this time that we're actually addressing this topic now had up to 1 million followers. I'll talk about the media coverage alongside Phase 3 because again, even at that point there wasn't that much media coverage just yet. In Phase 3, so from late February to about mid-March, this really spreads further and kind of metastasizes a bit. So, gradually this 5G story gets linked with other popular conspiracy theories. You may be familiar with some of those conspiracy theories around, you know, secret plans to depopulate the world and that features all the usual boogeyman of the of the conspiracy scene. George Soros, Bill Gates, the UN, the Illuminati, the Antichrist all make an appearance during this time. Some of it gets linked with alternative medicine theories, so theories circulate that 5G somehow reduces oxygen absorption and that's why people with COVID are having trouble breathing. General virus denialism even that COVID doesn't exist, there's all 5G and nothing else. Some of this gets further adjusted also as the pandemic itself spreads, so people may no longer be saying well it's all just 5G but 5G is just making it worse or whatever or 5G is being rolled out to make it worse and so on. But you're seeing this kind of a confluence of different conspiracy theories. Everyone with a conspiracy theory is basically retrofitting COVID-19 into that story and connecting it with that story. And we see this multilingual spread as well, here's a Romanian post, I'm not expecting you to read Romanian, but you probably see their names like George Soros and Bill Gates again pop up very much in the middle of that post. Again, there is that really transnational and translingual visibility of some of these typical targets of attack for conspiracy theories in whatever language you're working in. And as much as I can make out here this is again talking about, you know, that we're being experimented upon with vaccines that there's an international conspiracy that Soros and Gates are leading this and so on. And this spreads really right across particularly Southern and Eastern Europe, so Romania, Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, Spain, France as well. Interestingly enough and I don't want to point fingers but these are also often typical targets of Russian disinformation so it is possible that there is some degree of coordinated activity going on there as well. Some of the outbreaks in these countries also seem to be aligned with the timing of national lockdowns and other actions against the pandemic. It may simply be that people in lockdown have more time for doom scrolling or reading up on obscure spaces online, because there's nothing else to do they're sitting at home and they can't go anywhere so perhaps they're trying to work over what's going on here, and and thereby finding more of these obscure spaces and then sharing content possibly as well. However, still up to 70% of the spaces that are active during this time have fewer than 10,000 followers so this is still circulating around the fringes particularly at this point. The media coverage at this point is still very limited we picked up about 43 articles during phases two and three, and they are largely dominated by fringe outlets from the US I'm sorry to say. So that is your info wars and various other obvious fringe outlets that are frequently spreading conspiracy theories. There may be a handful of fact check articles on 5g and covered however, but they appear in very different spaces technology sides business sides, and they wouldn't have reached the same audiences quite likely as the conspiracy theories themselves so there's fact checking but it might just not really help much to convince people who are now browsing these these French conspiracy spaces, and that their conspiracies. And really then picks up is that phase four that's really the critical kind of tipping point I would say. And so, from mid March onwards we're seeing a real growth in media coverage media interest in this, partly this is driven by celebrities getting involved. And one of the first that we saw is the R&B singer Kerry hilsen. So here's a story from gq buzz on on Facebook, which reports essentially on her going on Twitter to say well, hey look this is all 5g you know turn off your phones. I disabling LTE which doesn't actually work. And you know this. She's obviously, you know, as they say done her research and found a lot of conspiracy stories from all over the place. And talking about the levels of radiation from 5g and so on turn that over to tweet to her many followers. And then of course as soon as a celebrity says something strange and controversial. The entertainment media like gq here are all over it. So, this is the sort of stuff that we're getting. And as entertainment and tabloid media are jumping right on to her and others who are doing doing this are saying these sorts of things. They're often doing this in a slightly humorous and kind of incredulous kind of tone, but they're also doing it quite uncritically so this is the story from gq buzz for instance, that is, as you see there very directly. I'm using Kerry Hilsen herself it's embedding a tweet from her. And of course that makes that tweet even more visible. So, in many ways these tabloid media, while they might, you know say hey you know this stupid celebrity got themselves into hot water by saying something controversial. And they're also helping to spread that information that the celebrity has posted, particularly to and I can't remember with this one specifically but if they're embedding screenshots, rather than just the tweets themselves then those screenshots of course will continue to persist on these sites, even if the celebrity things, things better of it and takes that course down again. So, it's quite possible that even though Hilsen in the meantime has taken down those tweets. In this article those tweets are still alive and people can still see what what she said and can still see the conspiracy theories that she spread, possibly even go to the links that she spread. So, this is really problematic obviously and it enhances the visibility, but also the longevity of this content beyond the celebrity themselves posting them on their Twitter or Facebook. So, this is actually quite problematic. So, the celebrity reporting gives us a lot more longevity and not more lasting impact ultimately. So, yeah, a number of the celebrities who get involved and Kerry Hilsen is not the only one kind of delete their content again after the backlash that they're getting after people are getting to them maybe their managers are just saying to them hey stop this and and take it down again some some of them will do that. But the circulation of their claims continues well beyond them having everything. We do see also quite significant spread here in other regions of the world in Africa and Southeast Asia partly also again because the entertainment media in those regions are picking up on celebrities elsewhere. We saw the the popular site in in in the Philippines Rappler, which is covering a lot of celebrity content for instance or from Kerry Hilsen and others it spreads into the Philippines and spreads into Southern Africa and other places, because they pick up on the celebrities saying these things. And we also see some amplification for some other prominent conspiracy theorists through this including sometimes politicians and journalists. And in part this is again because the celebrities actually are actually pointing attention towards them too. And as a result of all of this starting to happen. We're seeing also a growth in the reach of this content because now they're not just circulating in French spaces. But they're circulating via the, the personal pages of celebrities they're circulating via the entertainment media pages on Facebook. And so we're seeing a considerable considerable growth in the reach of this content. And the media coverage, as I say, really changes during this time it's still at this point because this is this is still the the start of the real outbreak. It's still somewhat low. And we pick up about 100 articles during this time of about two weeks. And many of them are entertainment and lifestyle outlets tabloids and so on. Many of them contain direct quotes of the conspiracy system cells or at least of the celebrities social media polls which in turn quote conspiracy content. And also, and this is obviously good to see a growth in fact checking articles, however, again, not necessarily in the spaces that are most active in spreading this conspiracy content. And then finally we could, we get to the final phase in in this timeframe from late March to mid April, and we're emboldened to some extent by the celebrity and media coverage. And we're seeing more of these outlandish conspiracy claims being made, and really the range of content here broadens out as well so with we saw for instance a post in in French, which, you know, does some basic numerology to to say Well, corona is off the devil and and all of that it's linked to the number 666 and so on. Now this sort of stuff if you look at it, you wouldn't think it actually goes very far but in Africa and French speaking Africa in France it reaches nearly 30 million followers via Facebook, or look, I need to say it potentially reaches obviously we can only see the follow numbers of these spaces we don't know if all of those followers necessarily see the post but the potential reach of this is up to 30 million followers. This could get translated into English versions as well so it circulates even more there. We're seeing in fact quite a bit of of African evangelicals getting involved here as well this is a apparently quite popular evangelical pastor in Nigeria, who, as you see there is drawing up some strange vaguely Sean Hannity like a kind of map of connections between covered and vaccines and 5g and everything else in and of things is in there as well. The New World Order is in there so bringing together all these kinds of conspiracy theories to to connect them up. And that has an audience potential audience of up to of over 43 million followers across the space that shared. The reason this is perhaps the most most direct link to the awesome attacks that happen later on the post that ends with. We need to click clip all wires and burn it all a massive bonfires fire destroys all, which seems to be a fairly direct incitement to attack these 5G technologies and 5G towers. The reason I'm showing you showing it to you in this form is because this is actually later on taken down as well so this is one of those posts that Facebook genuinely has taken down rather than just hitting behind the warning. And that's made on the 30th of March, just before the attacks start to happen in the UK so while we we don't really quite have a smoking gun here there's certainly an interesting alignment there in the timelines and it's quite possible that this post would have circulated into particularly perhaps evangelical communities in, in, in the UK, and possibly more more African British communities in the UK as well. So there is a pathway from here into the UK that's quite probable. So you see again, yeah spread in Southern Africa spread in the UK in anti 5G spaces, particularly. We also see something. So this is the notice now on that post as it now appears. And where it basically says this is not available so maybe the owners taken down maybe Facebook has banned it we're not sure but it's just no longer available which is probably good thing. So we see weird things like this as well. This is this claims to be by a former executive of Vodafone in the UK. As it turns out from media reporting after the fact. This is actually a Zimbabwe imposter that's based in Newton in the UK, who has claimed to be a former Vodafone executive and is making these claims. For some reason there is a strong evangelical connection here with this particular claim in the UK, especially. It's just very odd and not really easily expandable. But this again, potentially reaches 18 an audience of 18 million followers. And then again we see celebrities jumping as well this is the boxer army account in the US, who as you see there saying it's a man made thing it's a population control He's basically recorded a video in isolation or in in in quarantine and has put this out via his YouTube channel. This is then reposted as well by a page called give me sport where it reaches a very substantial audience of 25 million or so. And, and this is the the article on the give me sport side itself which directly embeds his conspiracy video so again, even it's, it doesn't really reach an audience simply just just via me accounts on channels or via the Facebook spaces that repost his content, but a popular sports news site in the UK then directly embeds this conspiracy video into its content as well, making it even more visible and that's obviously deeply problematic. And if that wasn't enough, the express a tabloid in the UK, have us this. And really in an article that broadly talks about YouTube takedowns and so on. It again embeds the video talking about conspiracies by a conspiracy friendly celebrity. And directly there under the first paragraph of the story so what you're taking away from that story is probably not so much that YouTube is taking is tightening the rules but that this celebrity is talking about how coronavirus is linked to 5G. So this is obviously deeply deeply problematic and just generalistically I think an absolute disgrace, frankly. So, so this is, but this is the sort of behavior that we do see particularly from tabloids particularly from entertainment sites over and over again in our data. And, you know, because of all of this again it starts to reach much bigger audiences 60% of course now are in spaces with more than 10,000 followers. So this time we're really seeing the arson attacks also starting to happen in the UK, then later in the Netherlands and elsewhere as well since earlier. Now in terms of the media coverage. This is really the bulk of the media coverage of course that happens. A good chunk of this about a third or so is about the arson attacks themselves. And the quarter is broadly about the spread of conspiracy theories relating to COVID and and focusing to some extent directly on 5G conspiracy theories as part of this. So there is a bit more general and objective reporting possibly going on there. There's about 11% that focus on the conspiracy claims by celebrities so that's not going away and of course 11% of this much larger amount is still a much bigger visibility than the, the, the 90 odd articles that we saw in the previous which were focused on on those celebrity claims much more. We also see 11% roughly of these articles covering the government responses so this sort of stuff in another tabloid in the UK the mirror. So governments now get involved and say this is as it says the dangerous nonsense and rubbish. And of course, unfortunately, if you send out someone like, like a minister gov here that may not actually help the bank conspiracy theories because he is himself so deeply distrusted by much the UK public so sending out credible and reliable and perhaps independence books people might be more useful and sending out a government minister has been widely criticized for many other things. So, but we do see some more government responses starting to happen during this. What we're seeing during this time and this is obviously good to see is that there is a reduction overall in the direct quoting and direct endorsement of conspiracies and conspiracies. The content here is now plain news reporting largely about the arson attacks that's not necessarily surprising but it is still, you know, kind of a return to have some more journalistic standard journalistic approaches. So, moving away from some of the sensationalism and some of the, the very unreflected reporting towards a more cautious reporting, but it has taken, you know, 60 odd arson attacks to get to that point, which is obviously. So just because I've mentioned this along the way this is the change in the size of pages as a percentage of the total over time so you see there that really through the middle through to the middle of March or so. About 30 to 40% of all pages that were sharing this content had fewer than 10 followers that maybe 70 to 80% of pages had fewer or had had fewer than 10,000 followers and you see that from about the middle of March onwards. Larger pages become much more active in sharing this kind of content so the percentage of pages that have 100,000 plus or a million plus followers grows the percentage of pages even with 10,000 plus followers grows. And so we're seeing from that point that the celebrities particularly get involved, much more visibility much more reach ultimately or potential reach across Facebook. And of course, again, these are only the public spaces. So what we cannot see from any of our data is the further circulation through private spaces through private public private profiles and so on. And of course, private groups and these sorts of space as well, direct messaging and so on. But the larger the the reach via these these public spaces the larger presumably is also the on sharing through the private parts of Facebook. Also, and again, the numbers here are very different during phases one to three phase four and phase five in terms of the news articles that we've gotten our data set so I don't want to make too much of this but having looked at how the conspiracy theory is is treated. In that first phase, we're seeing a lot of content that either outright supports the conspiracy theory, or at least reports and quotes on conspiracies claims. During the fourth phase we're seeing less support but far more reporting and quoting and that's really the celebrity phase where celebrity interventions in all of this are being reported being quoted being simply passed on essentially in a very stenographic way. And then finally in that fifth phase, the generous to coverage really reverts to a more standard model of reporting in fact checking with the great deal more caution about directly quoting conspiracy theorists, although there is still a good chunk of that going on. And, unfortunately, I have to say this hasn't stopped since then so this is a much more recent example from August this year of an Australian story. Which circulated across the news corp network. And that's the same company owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in the US of course, of basically a kind of a list of the top 10 misinformation spreaders in Australia. Now, this is hopefully quite self evidently problematic because what it does is do the very opposite of deep platforming. It actively platforms these people makes the much more visible to ordinary news audiences in Australia. It literally lists the top 10 misinformation spreaders it provides direct access essentially for people who are curious about misinformation to these people. So it really is a genuine boost, unfortunately to these misinformation spreaders and their visibility so even today and even by journalists or otherwise are actually pretty good in what they do. There are still these deeply problematic forms of coverage that are continuing to happen, possibly well meaning but ultimately, all that they do is help the help the conspiracies spread the word and attract more people to their cause. And so even today was it was still seeing journalists make these very fundamental mistakes and in how they cover these things. And I think that's, yeah, that's just really, really problematic. So it hasn't stopped with the endpoint of our data. So let me come to some conclusions here. And then hopefully we have a bit of time for discussion still to what we observe and what we, I think we can recommend from all of this is first. The really immediate impact of the hardcore conspiracy sites is actually quite limited. And they reach a very limited audience. They are perhaps a problem in themselves but they, they don't in themselves have significant influence beyond that hardcore of people who are already on board with the conspiracy theories. That's really the, the first few phases in our data we see that. Yes, they are raving at the mouth on about 5G and COVID-19 it just doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't reach large audiences beyond the already converted celebrities are one of the key vectors of spread in this so they can become super spreaders of miss and disinformation. They might think that they're doing the right thing but by amplifying some of these conspiracy theories, they make them much more visible they insert them into much more general conversations that are amongst people who are following celebrities not people who are following conspiracy theories. And, and so they are the ones that make these things. Yeah, much more visible and much more, more, more acceptable possibly as well by endorsing them. And that obviously is a very significant problem. And this is aided and abetted by particularly the soft news beats in journalism so entertainment sports tabloid media. Possibly, the journalistic ethos is far less developed as well so that the journalists who work for these outlets, not all of them but many of them might be in much more precarious positions they might be far less well trained. They are to to be perhaps a little bit disrespecting of them they are in entertainment journalism because perhaps they can't hack it as a political journalist, or in other hard news areas. They seem to apply, certainly from our data, fewer journalistic checks and balances, less fact checking, less review of the impact, I guess, of the stories that they're publishing. Often the coverage of celebrities is very stenographic is basically just saying he said she said someone got themselves into hot water or look here's here's a screenshot or in bed of their tweet or their Facebook post. Isn't it funny. And I think these journalists and these outlets really need to reflect much more on the impact that they're reporting has on general public well being. And they need to act more responsibly particularly when it comes to these kinds of really damaging and harmful conspiracy theories. So this is the soft underbelly the weak spot of journalism in many ways. We haven't looked in great detail at takedowns but what we do see from them is that they do delay and disrupt the dissemination of some of these stories we see in our data for instance that some videos that were shared at some point are taken down and be platformed and that really disrupts the spread some of them get get uploaded again to alternative video sharing sites and reposted and so on and there's some other workarounds for these takedowns but amongst ordinary users it seems quite obvious that takedowns do delay this kind of dissemination and do frustrate the broader spread of some of these videos particularly but also other content. So what that does essentially is to introduce more distance between the mainstream and fringe groups. It makes it more difficult for fringe conspiracist information to spread into a more mainstream audience and to affect the more mainstream audience. So what's important there again from a journalistic point of view is of course to avoid any kind of news coverage that actually undermines these takedowns by making the content more persistent. So embedding or even posting a screenshot of a celebrity's post embedding a celebrity's conspiracy video in a mainstream news article really obviously spreads and aids the spread of this damaging information into the mainstream. Sometimes even some of the news outlets will actually create their own video version of a conspiracy video and stick that on their own video server so even YouTube takedowns aren't going to reach that kind of company anymore. So this is again a very problematic kind of activity so news outlets really need to be very careful about how they're covering this and how much visibility they unwittingly possibly give to this kind of content by reposting it and making it more persistent beyond the takedowns that might happen on the social media platforms themselves. And then of course one of the really key questions and all of this is when should official authorities whether that's government or companies or anyone else experts and respond to this miss and disinformation. If you respond to early obviously then like the news coverage you might just giving this content more visibility. So you don't want to aid in the dissemination of this content obviously if you respond to late well it's simply too late and your response isn't going to make much of a difference anymore. And the other challenges of course to respond in a way that actually reaches the same audiences that have been reached by the conspiracy content itself so. It's not enough for Michael gov to to step up to the podium and say the covert 5G connection is nonsense, and for that to report to be reported in the times of London. And it needs to be reported in those celebrity and tabloid media that covered the original conspiracy theory itself. And that's of course very difficult, particularly when the, the statements being made by government are so bland and so anemic that they're not going to be of interest to celebrity media so they need to be other ways of doing this. And to give you an example. These are some of the official statements that have been made this is by the UN, saying there is this this whole conspiracy is a hoax with no technical basis. That was made on the 22nd of April 2020. This is the UK government guidance on 5G and coronavirus and doesn't that sound exciting. And this is by the Australian government about misinformation linking 5G and the coronavirus on the 18th of May 2020. This is a piece in the Guardian. And, and of course, this is really here to show the attacks actually happened on the 4th of April. So, even the UN response comes a full what three weeks or so after the attacks, after the height of the attacks in the UK. And the UK government one comes basically a month after the attacks. So that's not really very helpful anymore at that point because the worst of the crisis has already happened. And government should have responded much more fortunately right at the start ideally before the start of these attacks obviously to ward off these conspiracy theories. A lot of these attacks are a lot of these these statements from government are made very much after the fact, and aren't really going to change anything anymore. So, this, this is again a case of governments and officials folks people reacting well too late. Unfortunately. So let me finish here perhaps with an analogy and it'd be interesting to talk with you a little bit about this because the more I see the, the way that we treat the virus itself and the way that we treat this miss and disinformation the more I see some similarities now this is perhaps drawing a bit of a long bow and I don't want to just treat everything that spreads virally online with the language of epidemiology but I think there is actually a useful overlap here. So, if you think about the the takedowns the deep platforming and some of the digital literacy approaches as well that we're taking to helping people not fall prey to conspiracy information. In some ways this equates really to public health measures like lockdowns like quarantine like the mask mandates as well. All of this is designed to slow the spread of problematic information to vulnerable communities. It doesn't obviously solve the underlying problem of miss and disinformation of conspiracy theories but essentially it widens the gap between ordinary mainstream communities and the the fringe. And ultimately, who are spreading this miss and disinformation. So, these are important measures in trying to generate a bigger gap between these communities, make the spread from one to the other, more difficult. And that's the real fix, ultimately, to the spread of this, this problematic content, or of course to the virus itself is actually something else and that's in the communication case it's really deradicalization it's really trying to reduce communities of of members by deradicalizing people who are already drawn into them. And in many ways this is equivalent perhaps in the viral sense to vaccination. It's removing potential carriers potential super spreaders, but it is only efficient if the vast majority of the population are actually particularly in that way. So if you have a large quantity of the population who are open to radical ideas were not vaccinated in the viral case of course then this kind of information in the virus itself will continue to spread. And in both cases actually you have, and you need to have public information campaigns of course, in either case, they need to enable people to make an informed choice to be comfortable about vaccination deradicalization take downs the platforming and so on. And that requires clear and accurate information and communication from the public officials from other stakeholders as well not necessarily always government officials but experts, and, and technologies possibly as well. And that's only that generates the community trust in these health measures for physical and information. So I think, again, I'm, I'm, I have a question mark here and I'm reluctant to say this is, this is entirely equivalent. I think we need to think about our responses on our toolkit of responses to miss and disinformation in in much as much the similar way that there are sort of immediate responses that we can take to arrest the spread. At the moment, and then much more longer term and much more difficult responses that we also need to take in order to ultimately reduce the risk of further outbreaks by vaccinating by the radical. So, maybe we can have a bit of a chat about that aspect of all of this as well. But with that, I might leave it and hopefully we have a bit of time for discussion as well. Thank you actual so I noticed there's a couple questions that are in the chat window so you might want to take a quick browser that I'm and then I had a thought in your questions as you, as you were talking that I'll just throw in there. You know, so sometimes viral information is the result of simultaneous cascades. And just slowing down the spread may inhibit the simultaneity. I'm not sure how to say that. That kicks off percolating clusters that drive viral events. So that's one. So that's just a thought there, but I do notice like I said, he has a question. Matt's got a question in there. And Jasmine had a question in there. Okay, so where where where do we want to start. I don't really have the questions here. So yes, Bulgaria would be in there if it used the Latin alphabet. But if it uses at least the Latin alphabet for terms like 5G and COVID then it might start here. And yes, same with with other alphabets I see the Iranian Farsi. Yes, absolutely. And we do occasionally pick up a little bit of that when they yeah they take terms or they take. But what we capture pools that basically use 5G with the Latin letters when everything else around it is a relic of Farsi. But we wouldn't necessarily have captured the majority of that content if it uses the another alphabet another script all the way through. So that that is one of the limitations here. And of course we could, you know, we could have potentially increased our data gathering to a much broader range of capture but we simply didn't have the capacity to work out what COVID and 5G would look like in all sorts of other languages so we've limited it to the Latin alphabet at this point. Just going through Matt Clark you're talking about the negative response to government officials. Yes, absolutely. And this is yes, and the Fauci in the US obviously has been very much a lightning rod I guess for for some of these conspiracy groups this is the same in many other countries whoever becomes the default expert essentially on this ends up being again to a certain point if the attacks are coming purely from fringe groups then they may not be worth responding to because it just gives these fringe groups more visibility. So there is again a calculus to be made, you know what to what extent do you engage with these or simply ignore and thereby essentially deny them that form. But yes, if celebrities got more involved and they have been, you know, in fairness there have been a bunch of celebrities who've been more active than others in talking back and essentially responding to perhaps their followers who were trying to get them to share miss and disinformation by saying no actually I fully agree with the science and I think we should all get vaccinated and masked up and whatever. So, some celebrities do get it in the end but quite a few, I think, are simply obviously not equipped to be fully understand the science perhaps or just not that that interested in it so we do. I think if we if we saw more celebrities get involved in the public health effort then that may well help of course. It could also backfire if the celebrity who's very obviously aligned with one side of politics obviously speaks out and the other side of politics would probably just say well obviously they would say that wouldn't they so I don't know if Lady Gaga says yes we should all get vaccinated that's great and her followers might do it but the people who hate her aren't going to be convinced by that so you'd need really celebrities from all sides of the political spectrum as well in doing this. Just going through Lenny. Have you spotted any connection between the current political situation. Yeah. It's, it's difficult to say this in in full because again what what we're looking at here is covering obviously quite a broad range of countries but I'd say, at least anecdotally. Yes, certainly that there have been connections between the local groups and the, perhaps the visibility of some of these conspiracy theories. There are some really obvious examples I guess I mean in Brazil you basically got an anti vaxa president for instance so clearly that makes it a lot easier to spread conspiracy theories about this as well. In Italy, I think we saw to that with the complex political situation that the journalists and experts and other groups aligned with various sides of politics have taken very different approaches to this and some of them have quite actively been spreading mis and disinformation content. We do see sometimes some very odd and unusual alliances there as well so in in Germany for instance there's the, the far right, you know neo fascist party the AFD that has been very vaccine and, and the mask skeptic, particularly, and has been spreading some conspiracy theories at times. And, and oddly enough, they, they kind of often align with the alternative health or alternative medicine fringes that are essentially also rejecting scientific evidence and are pushing their own, you know wonder remedies like hydroxychloroquine or either making or whatever else is the current drug that they're pushing. So, sometimes you get these kind of weird lines is between what what is far right and what normally would have been perhaps far far left and quite hippie ultimately. There are some really weird connections there that we see there as well. But I wouldn't want to go as far as making any kind of general claims here because we would need to look more much more specifically into the situation in specific countries to do this. I will say just very briefly on this we have another research project at the moment that's looking at the dissemination of content from the Russian propaganda at RT on Facebook across different language communities and we're lucky enough to have a bunch of people in our country who speak Arabic, German, French, Russian, Spanish, and so we're able to do more of a cross country and cross language study there. So, with, with that we are again looking at where in these countries or where in these language communities is RT content actually being shared, and we're seeing this and very different lines with the far right in Germany with the far left in France, with the far right and over far left in Latin American countries depending on who's currently in opposition. So, there are, you know, it's the disenfranchise that in whatever political system you're in that often seem to be particularly open to spreading conspiracy theories but again, more on that once we've developed this a bit further. And yes, Jeff, you mentioned the spread of information cascades and because some of the measures now that Facebook and Twitter have been taking by having these overlays saying well this is potentially misinformation, or Twitter saying well would you like to read the story first before you retweeted. I think those nudges can help to a certain extent, although at some point people will probably just bank these nudges and kind of just ignore them because they're just so common now. For real conspiracy theorists, those nudges might actually be an encouragement because it means that hey we must be onto something Facebook is trying to hide what we're doing. And that's not a reason not to do it because for ordinary people it might still help and the conspiracies you have to address I think in different ways with the radicalization. But it, yeah, there is a there's a limit to how far this can go. And I think Jenny you've got your hand up as well. Hey, Axel, it's great to listen to you. Hopefully my internet it's really bad right now so hopefully I come across as not a pixelated set of mush. So I really appreciate this presentation and one of the things that struck me. As you're presenting on these five phases. I happen to know that you do other research that also is looking at conspiracy spread on other topics. And I'm kind of curious whether those five phases as you describe them are. Is that is there potentially a, I don't know what the word is exactly but just do you see that in other conspiracies and misinformation spread, or are the dynamics different and in other words every, I don't know misinformation plot if you will manifest differently as it spreads through digital media. That's a very good question and I'm not sure I can say yet to be honest. And I guess maybe just for background so Jenny is also part of a research project we have here that's basically about the spread of misinformation. And for that we've gathered a very large data set essentially of links to known or suspected problematic news sites, fake news sites if you will, from Facebook over the last few years. But we, what we haven't done yet really and that's, that's, I think that would help answer that question is to look at a broader range of conspiracy stories or, you know, fake news stories essentially, and how they spread over time and I think that will help give us an idea of whether these phases are kind of repeated in other cases as well or not. I think it may depend to some extent on the nature of the conspiracy story as well. Some of course are very narrow and very short lived. So, you know, I don't know did Joe Biden where an earpiece at one of the presidential debates or not you know that's that's a very limited kind of thing exactly is there and then disappears again and isn't probably going to spread in this way. There are bigger themes I guess not so much conspiracy stories themselves but themes and in some ways I should perhaps talk about the 5G stuff as a, as a theme as well because it has a number of different angles a number of different ways it's expressed. As you've seen, you know, some of it is is linking it to, you know, fringe religious kind of views some of it is linking it to, you know, global new world order kind of claims and whatever. And these sorts of larger kind of more complex themes. I think it is quite possible that there is a, a gradual kind of spread from the fringes to the mainstream and. But again, there will be these sorts of tipping points I guess at which it moves from the fringe into a much more visible kind of space. And I would, I would expect to some extent celebrities and kind of gateway media I guess to be playing role there. Interesting actually the celebrity pieces and I hadn't really thought about the role of celebrities in as amplifiers of these messages and so that you caught that I think is really important. And I think it goes back to something that Matt had raised in his comment about, you know, if you can, from an intervention point of view. We're working to encourage influencers to provide counter messaging with their large audiences and that that massive voice to be able to drowned out or counter or push against some of the conspiracies and misinformation ideation that's coming from other corners. You can't stamp it out I mean that's we've always believed in conspiracies and we spread a misinformation. But maybe there are some from an intervention point of view things that could be done in service of supporting public health, for example, COVID. So anyway, awesome stuff, Axel really appreciate it. Thanks. One just maybe as an anecdote here. One campaign that we've seen in Australia for instance is the largest telephony provider Telstra has run a campaign is still running a campaign with a popular comedian Mark Humphrey. Who is essentially, yeah, doing this as a kind of comedic steak steak that he's basically, you know, sitting in an office saying yeah, we're rolling out 5G soon you won't need your phone anymore lobby intravenous or whatever. And so just really making fun of these claims and thereby, yeah, making I guess the responses much more visible as well. And that reaches obviously a very different audience from just some trusty Telstra spokesman kind of going on camera saying you know there's nothing wrong with 5G. And so that that I think these sorts of approaches do help and the more, yeah, celebrities and others can be enlisted. Of course, when I say celebrities to it's not literally just, you know, singers and actors but there are political celebrities as well and others, sports stars and anyone else who's got a significant amount of visibility, and a particular audience who could be involved in this and you're right, just influences online and others really have a role to play in all of this too. And I'm just Jeff I know you've got your hand up I'm just going to go quickly to Matt Clark here again to and so that uptake about entering isolation. Again, we haven't done any detailed data work on this but we have certainly seen that the outbreak for instance of Romanian spread off of this story. It seemed to happen exactly at the point that the Romanian government declared a nationwide lockdown. We saw actually in the US as well when there was, there's sometimes just a kind of a very opportunistic response to lockdowns we saw a number of stories circulating that lockdowns in the US were being used to secretly install 5G in schools. So sometimes it's, it's the story itself that's being used sometimes I think it is genuinely that as people are going into lockdown they're sitting at home 24 seven they can't go anywhere can't do anything. And what do you do you go online and you try and find out when this is going to be over and what what really is happening and you pay more attention to us because suddenly it affects you. I do think there is a there is a connection there between people just sitting around being frustrated and people drifting off into more, you know, more fringe areas or simply searching more widely than they do. Yeah, doom scrolling exactly. And there is a, I think there is some much older research as well that that says that particularly at times of crisis of course, when the general information environment isn't very clear yet and even official sources and that people are more willing to search more widely and basically accept the plausible explanations that they come across, even from less reliable sources because they're simply desperate for any kind of answers any kind of, you know, future pathways or whatever out of this so if the government is quite rightly saying we don't know yet. Then they're going to go to some medical expert that says well if we just switch off 5G everything will go back to normal. And that's that's of course simplifying it but I think there is a there is a pattern there and that's, that's, there's been some evidence over the years that yeah people will end up just going to some fringe outlets if the main ones don't really provide them the answers that they're looking for. Jeff. So one of the comments Jenny made reminded me of something that I was thinking about during your talk you show a slide where you've got an area graph, the area graph is showing the phases. But another thing that that area graph what's doing is, it's showing the increase in stories over time, which creates a shape and the shape is kind of a standard shape. So we've seen that a lot and in fact, if you fit a curve to that line then you can measure the growth over time. And then you could, if you could create that curve for multiple different conspiracy theories, then you might be able to do things like predict. If the curve is sharp enough, does that mean that something is going to happen offline in the real world, or at a certain point, then that's one thing to take off right so there's there's actually been a fair amount of research on predicting how far virality is going to spread, based on the shape of the signature. So that might be an interesting direction to go with, if you have more cases. Yeah, absolutely. And the other part I guess that we're we're kind of interested in using this for two is to really get a sense of well when, when should there be official responses again that that question, as I said is not too early not too late you need to find that sort of Goldilocks zone where where now you can have an impact you can ward off the further spread of this without simply going too early and giving it more attention than it had in the first place. And I've got a new PhD student who's actually been doing some work here with one of our state governments as a social media analyst. And they, they really in that in that very practical work in state government which has responsibility for for handling the crisis. And they have faced that problem over and over again where, you know, yes, there are, you know, claims about lockdowns or claims about quarantine or claims about whatever masks and so on. And they've had to work out over and over again well if this is circulating. At what point is it circulating enough that it warrants a response from government, or whoever is the appropriate spokesperson. And to stop that from circulating further or to at least arrest the spread of it. And yeah with with that sort of curve or with with some sort of measure I guess of both the volume but also the the reach I guess so if it's if it's high volume but in in spaces of you know tens of people. You know, not need to respond but once it starts to hit those million plus groups, then there probably is a need to really engage with that and bought it off so yeah trying to work out where is that kind of that tipping point essentially where it reaches a wider audience and can you capture it and and just stop it before it reaches that tipping point, I think would be very, very important. I don't know how, again I don't know how systematic that is and how much this would be the same for different conspiracy stories. We simply need to do more work on this and try and understand this better. And, of course, we need to look at it across platforms as well and this is all from Facebook but some of this stuff, all of this stuff spreads on Facebook on Twitter on Instagram on WhatsApp on the minor platforms as well so we've got to get a bigger sense of all of this, rather than just rely on Facebook as sort of the big platform. Thank you, Axel. So we've kept Axel kind of a long time. Are there any last minute short questions. And if not, maybe we'll close up. Axel, thanks a lot for taking the time to talk with us. Thank you all. It's been a great conversation as well. Thank you. Take care. Alright, thanks very much. See you soon. Hopefully. Right.