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.

This has been the best day. 🤩

I had the pleasure and privilege to be external examiner for williamdance.bsky.social PhD on Disinformation discourses seen through corpora. Thanks William for an engaging read and a brilliant discussion today. And congratulations Dr Dance! drclaireh.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social

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.

New from me: ‘Corpus Linguistics and Social Media,’ to be published in print and online for the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition in 2026. For now, you can find it online here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Another 'Questioning Vaccination Discourses' paper is out! "‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: A new type of vaccine-specific scepticism on Twitter/X during the COVID-19 pandemic" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... By @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social et al

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...

New open access paper by Questioning Vaccination Discourse (Quo VaDis) project team (www.lancaster.ac.uk/vaccination-...) on expressions of #vaccine #indecision on a parenting forum. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I suppose one way to start here is to share a new publication. Here it goes: '‘I am still unsure’ - Spontaneous expressions of vaccine indecision on Mumsnet' with @vaclavbrezina.bsky.social @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social @drclaireh.bsky.social et al. #healthcomm #vaccinations

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...

This is the most extraordinary statement I’ve ever seen from a social media executive. There’s too much to unpack immediately, but the takeaway here is that Zuckerberg is doing what he *feels* is right, with no oversight, no real transparency, and with global impact. about.fb.com/news/2025/01...

My blog FakeBelieve had its best ever year in 2024 with 3,151 visitors from 72 countries spanning 5 continents! 🌍 The top countries were the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and the Philippines. I published 5 new posts with some new resources for adults and kids too. Check it all out at: fakebelieve.blog

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 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/

In case you're interested in working on language & food with me at FU Berlin, check out this job ad for a (full-time) postdoc position: www.fu-berlin.de/universitaet... (the ad is in German only but I guess auto translation is your friend) #LanguageAndFood #CulinaryLinguistics

Unpaywalled preservation copy archive.is/202411160151...

The Washington Post has uncovered details of a $45 million initiative led by Elon Musk’s advisors that was aimed at using “misdirection” ads, often featuring false claims about Kamala Harris, to target Black, Jewish, Muslim, and other voter groups. (🔒) www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Did one! Not listed and should be? Let me know 🙂 go.bsky.app/AT6KX6X

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.

If you’re interested in reading about some of the central concepts and issues surrounding disinformation and ‘fake news’, take a look at the FakeBelieve blog. There are free-to-access research posts, case studies, and counter-disinformation resources. More at: www.fakebelieve.blog

Next week (Weds 7th Feb, 1300-1400) we will be at @lshtm.bsky.social where we will be talking about the construction and analysis of our Victorian anti-vaccination discourse corpus ‘VicVaDis’. The talk will be both in-person (London) and online: www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

Join us online on February 15th (1200-1330 GMT) where we’ll be giving a webinar ‘The Questioning Vaccination Discourse Project (Quo VaDis): What we have learnt’. The webinar will discuss the rationale for the project, its methods, challenges and key findings: lancaster-uk.libcal.com/calendar/fac...

The CREST Security Review has today released an issue focusing on misinformation and how the behavioral sciences play a critical role in tackling this growing problem. Read on: crestresearch.ac.uk/magazine/mis...