Dealing with Toxic News
Project description
The project starts from the observation that the news environment is polluted with disinformation that makes media harmful rather than beneficial for democracy. It takes a media repertoire approach to disinformation, which has the benefit of not studying various of its emanations in isolation from each other. The project will analyse citizens’ practices to cope with information in such a ‘toxic’ news environment. It will investigate 1) how citizens evaluate what they see as trustworthy and believable, 2) which individual- and collective-level factors shape different coping strategies and 3) how these can be traced to psychological, cultural, socio-economic and socio-political roots. The project relates to the theme of democratisation of information and expertise.
We are open to qualitative and quantitative analyses. The quantitative data will be provided by the Digital News Report Survey executed by our collaboration partner, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The qualitative data will be collected through semi-structured, elicitation interviews.
Current initiatives to tackle disinformation at the European level focus on strengthening media literacy and supporting investigative journalism. While this approach is valuable, it also poses challenges as to how citizens can incorporate these skills in their daily news routines. A deeper understanding of citizens’ coping practices can help policy makers and media educators to develop initiatives aimed at improving current coping practices and will win citizens’ acceptance.
About the research Group
SMIT Research Group
SMIT stands for Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology. Our research group is part of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and imec.
Promotor Ike Picone teaches and researches disruptions on the crossroad of journalism, technological innovations and democracy. The thread within his research is the study of news use practices within the broad field of journalism studies. More precisely, his work focuses on ‘productive’ use of new(s) media, conceptualized within his research as self-publication. The scope is to understand how people participate to media as a social practice, and what motivations and thresholds play a role in shaping this practice. His research topics include user participation to online news, the changing relationship between news audiences and journalists and the role of new media;in the emergence of deliberative public spheres.
Dr. Ike Picone is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Senior Researcher within the research group IMEC-SMIT. The threadwithin his research is the study of news use practices within the broad field of journalism studies. More precisely, his work focuses on ‘productive’ use of new(s) media, conceptualized within his research as self-publication. The scope is to understand how people participate to media as a socialpractice, and what motivations and thresholds play a role in shaping this practice.
His research topics include user participation to online news, the changing relationship between news audiences and journalists and the role of new media in the emergence of deliberative public spheres. Within Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology research group (SMIT), he is part of senior staffand responsible for developing the ‘Tackling Disinformation’ research strand, one of the priorities of SMIT’s strategic research agenda for 2019-2020. He is part of the international team working on the renowned yearly Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. His expertise has been acknowledged amongst others through his membership of the Flemish Council for Journalism and the temporary expert group on Fake News of former Belgian Minister of Digital Agenda Alexander De Croo. He has been vocal about the issue of disinformation in the Belgian media. He is also a member of the Council for Journalism of Flanders (Belgium).