@inproceedings{5fc95383be37421ebd9c9e4d5ac577e0,
title = "#ArsonEmergency and Australia{\textquoteright}s “Black Summer”: Polarisation and Misinformation on Social Media",
abstract = "During the summer of 2019–2020, while Australia suffered unprecedented bushfires across the country, false narratives regarding arson and limited backburning spread quickly on Twitter, particularly using the hashtag. Misinformation and bot- and troll-like behaviour were detected and reported by social media researchers and the news soon reached mainstream media. This paper examines the communication and behaviour of two polarised online communities before and after news of the misinformation became public knowledge. Specifically, the Supporter community actively engaged with others to spread the hashtag, using a variety of news sources pushing the arson narrative, while the Opposer community engaged less, retweeted more, and focused its use of URLs to link to mainstream sources, debunking the narratives and exposing the anomalous behaviour. This influenced the content of the broader discussion. Bot analysis revealed the active accounts were predominantly human, but behavioural and content analysis suggests Supporters engaged in trolling, though both communities used aggressive language.",
keywords = "Crisis, Information campaigns, Misinformation, Polarisation, Social media",
author = "Derek Weber and Mehwish Nasim and Lucia Falzon and Lewis Mitchell",
note = "Funding Information: Acknowledgment. The work has been partially supported by the Cyber Security Research Centre Limited whose activities are partially funded by the Australian Government{\textquoteright}s Cooperative Research Centres Programme. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020, Commonwealth of Australia.; 2nd Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media, MISDOOM 2020 ; Conference date: 26-10-2020 Through 27-10-2020",
year = "2020",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_11",
language = "English",
isbn = "9783030618407",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
publisher = "Springer Science + Business Media",
pages = "159--173",
editor = "{van Duijn}, Max and Mike Preuss and Frank Takes and Suzan Verberne and Viktoria Spaiser",
booktitle = "Disinformation in Open Online Media - 2nd Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2020, Proceedings",
address = "United States",
}