Had a fantastic week in Montignac-Lascaux to celebrate completing my PhD 🇫🇷

Enjoyed canoeing 20km of the Vézère river, visiting Montignac’s Distillerie de l’Òrt, and soaking up the French sun ☀️

Delighted to announce that I’ll be starting as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Media and International Directorate in the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS)!

I’ll be working on BBC policy, including the upcoming BBC Charter Review, and I’m looking forward to helping shape UK media policy.

Happy to say that today I passed my PhD viva with no corrections at Lancaster University!

Thanks to @journolinguist.bsky.social and @karinpt.bsky.social for being fantastic external and internal examiners, and to my supervisor @drclaireh.bsky.social for helping me get here.

New from me 🚨

“Disinformation and Algorithms: Amplification, Reception and Correction”

I contribute to the theory around disinformation and misinformation studies and then carry out a corpus-based analysis of the use of tokens like ‘disinformation’ on Twitter.

www.cambridge.org/universitypr...

Spotted a lot of April Fools’ Day activity from brands and organisations on social media yesterday.

Strikingly, the only one I encountered that didn’t use genAI images was this from the British Transport Police.

Shows another way in which genAI has become the first port of call for ease and cost.

We’re experiencing an interesting phenomenon here:

There is a Pikachu-themed activist in the demonstrations in Türkiye, but the visual used here (and elsewhere) is AI generated. This blending of legitimate and fabricated content further complicates what people can believe online.

I talked about the social and technical factors that contribute to belief in celebrity misinformation to @theathletic.bsky.social/ @nytimes.com and how it’s often family members and people associated with celebrities who end up the targets of false information too. www.nytimes.com/athletic/613...

I was just on BBC Radio Wales talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement regarding moderation and fact checking on Meta platforms, and how he is embracing the ‘Musk approach’.

Here’s a clip and you can hear the full 6 minute interview on my blog: fakebelieve.blog/media-engage...

It’s available on my blog (@fakebelieveblog.bsky.social) as a PDF or PNG and I’ve also made it available as individual tiles, alongside the larger infographic. #disinformation

Here’s a simple explainer for kids on how to navigate and understand (dis)information online.

It teaches kids how to process information online, reiterating the specific things that they can do when on social media and the wider internet. #DigitalLiteracy

Find it at: fakebelieve.blog/resources/

I have a few of these on my blog now, and they’re free to access and redistribute for anyone who wants to use them. #disinformation

I thought I'd make a new explainer for my blog
(@fakebelieveblog.bsky.social).

For this one l've focused on hostile-state information operations (HSIOs).

The explainer is available as a PNG or PDF from my blog as a whole, or as individual tiles, here: fakebelieve.blog/resources/

Unlike X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, BlueSky allows users to input free text when reporting content on its platform.

At the moment it benefits from a relatively small user base (15 million) and therefore can handle safety better, but it’ll be interesting to see if this stays as it grows.