Last week I was in Dublin for two events hosted by the Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU.
On Tuesday, I was an invited participant at a roundtable entitled ‘ Supporting LGBTIQ+ Youth and Families in the Digital Era: Safety, misinformation and Wellbeing’ at the European Commission High level Conference on Non-Discrimination (LGBTIQ+ rights). We discussed barriers to LGBTIQ+ young people accessing support on social media, what strategies they deploy to navigate online hate and misinformation, and how they can be better supported by families and NGOs. Many thanks to Bella, Dillon, Juliane, Ruadhán and the audience for the contributions.
On Wednesday, I delivered an invited presentation to the European Commission Expert Group on LGBTIQ+ Equality. The title of my talk was ‘Support through screens but at what cost? How LGBTIQ+ young people in Ireland navigate online misinformation’. I discussed the findings from an interview and diary based study funded by the Department of Children, Disability & Equality, Ireland.
Many thanks to our colleagues at DCDE (Jean McGrath, Nuala Connolly & Sinead McEvoy) for the invitation to participate. I will share details of the final report in due course.
In August I participated in a panel at the Scottish Parliament’s Festival of Politics. Entitled ‘Why we need to talk about AI’, we discussed a wide variety of issues relating to the growth in LLMs in contemporary societies.
The abstract for the panel is below:
Chatbots are transforming society, politics and business and it’s one of the biggest and fastest technological changes in history. Millions of people now talk to ChatGPT, daily. It has moved from novelty to everyday infrastructure astonishingly fast with people organising their finance to seeking therapy via machines. Some people use it to intensify their work productivity while others fall into dangerous conspiracy rabbit-holes and emotionally risky content. How do we learn how to talk– and not to talk to AI in a way that makes the most of technology rather than succumb to manipulation?
Big thanks to our chair Maggie Chapman MSP, the other panelists (Robert.P. Moran, Dr. Kate Orton-Johnson and Dr. Ronnie Smith) and the audience for contributing to an excellent discussion.
Last week I presented at the annual Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (MeCCSA) conference at the University of Leicester. I thoroughly enjoyed the panels I attended, catching up with folk (including several from when I worked at Leicester over ten years ago!), and participated in my first MeCCSA pub quiz (‘The Team With No Name’ held their own ;). Many congratulations to Julian Matthews and the team for organising a great conference.
The Sir Bob Burgess building is primed and ready for delegates. MeCCSA 2026 begins tomorrow at the University of Leicester … #meccsa2026@meccsa.bsky.social @deptmedialeic.bsky.social
Social media, entangled conflict memories, and peacebuilding in post-violence societies
Social media are increasingly integral to how we both remember and forget conflict. These highly personalised newsfeeds present a challenge to peacebuilding initiatives in ‘post-violence’ societies. While online platforms provide the architecture for a more inclusive and pluralistic conflict memory politics, they also algorithmically amplify hate speech and mis-and disinformation, that undermines community relations. The durability of collective conflict memories, previously synonymous with physical archives and legacy media coverage, is undermined by the sheer number of agents and platforms involved in its production today. In this paper, I focus on how these entanglements between mnemonic agents and platforms produce conflict memories in post-violence societies like Cyprus and Northern Ireland. I argue that the role of legacy media in providing materials for the public remembrance of conflict has been usurped by digital technologies, which enable users to bear witness to atrocities by searching for and sharing survivor testimonies. What was once a shared reality experienced through ‘mainstream’ media has been replaced by personalized war feeds accessible via apps like TikTok, where the legitimacy of conflicts is contested and their legacies debated. This undoubtedly raises questions about the role of online platforms in curating conflict memory materials, especially when many appear to hide behind ‘free speech’ whilst refusing to remove online hate and misinformation. However, it is expedient for political elites to blame platforms for the persistence of antagonistic modes of remembering conflict rather than address the structural factors and conflict legacy issues that divide communities in post-violence societies.
This week I am attending the 11th European Communication Conference (ECC2026) in Brno, Czechia. My paper, co-authored with Suay Özkula, draws on our previous systematic review of empirical Digital Activism research. This paper explores how ethics is narrated in DA research to date. We will present some preliminary insights from our systematic review of the literature.
The abstract can be read below:
Non-maleficence without institutional gatekeeping? How ethical issues are addressed in empirical digital activism research
While early studies played down ethical concerns about online research, there has been a shift towards more formal systems governing social media research over the past decade. Institutional regulatory structures like Research Ethics Boards have increasingly scrutinised these projects, with ethics forms becoming ‘gatekeepers’ for how universities organise research culture. There has been a concurrent growth in ethical guidelines for online research from organisations like the Association of Internet Researchers. Yet, there remain doubts as to how seriously ethics is treated in research, above all in studies employing data mining techniques. This is particularly salient for Digital Activism (DA) studies, where activists might be exposed to harm through their identification in publications. In response to this issue, our paper provides a critical discussion of how ethical issues are addressed in empirical DA research. We draw on data gathered from a systematic review of journal articles published between 2009 and 2024. In the first instance, mentions of research ethics were searched in protest literature more broadly (N= 264) and then in DA articles specifically (N=59). Coding categories included how ethics were narrated (e.g., popular approaches or the mention of formal procedures) as well as what attributes characterised articles discussing research ethics, for example the platform(s) studied, method(s) of data collection and analysis, authors’ institutional affiliations and their respective disciplines. We tested specifically whether empirical DA research included ethics statements i.e. outlining whether ethics approval had been obtained prior to the study beginning and what measures were taken to protect participants, and whether articles were more likely to address ethical issues if they drew on traditional rather than digital data sources. Results indicate that very few DA articles published during this period included ethics statements. Nevertheless, there was much evidence of non-maleficence in the corpus, including those studies using digital methods. These are often rendered opaque by the submission requirements of journals and the norms of certain disciplines.
Our paper is scheduled for Thursday 10th (11:15), in room K2:200.
If you are at the conference this week please do say hi – looks like a great programme!
De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Political Communication, published July 2026
I have a chapter in the recently published De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Political Communication. Many thanks to the fantastic editors, Mark Wheeler and & Petros Iosifidis for the invitation, and for pulling together such an excellent volume.
My chapter is entitled ‘Ethical Dilemmas in Researching Sousveillance on YouTube Revisited’.
The abstract can be read below:
The socio-technical affordances of online platforms like YouTube enable citizens to distribute sousveillance (or inverse surveillance) footage, focusing attention on police brutality, to a potential global audience. This undoubtedly creates new opportunities for qualitative researchers exploring the role of social media in contemporary protest and social movements, but it also presents a series of ethical dilemmas to be addressed. Most notably, scholars must consider the feasibility and desirability of seeking informed consent from those uploading and commenting on these videos. This requires some engagement with the merits of the so-called ‘fair game’ defence, namely that publicly available social media data can be used without ethical considerations due to the fact that users should be aware of such data collection courtesy of the terms of service of each platform. In this paper, I consider what measures, if any, should be taken to protect those who comment on social media sousveillance. I do so by revisiting the ethical approach taken during a previous study of how YouTube was used to share sousveillance footage, namely the 2011 ‘Battle of Stokes Croft’ in Bristol, England. I reflect on whether a different stance might be taken if this research was to be conducted in the contemporary era. I argue that sousveillance researchers should focus on what is said online rather than who says it.
The book can be purchased online and you can read a preprint of my chapter here.
The launch event for Bad News on the Cost of Living Crisis will be held in a few weeks’ time. It will be jointly sponsored by the Glasgow University Media Group and Red Pepper Magazine.
GUMG and RPM invite you to join them for the launch of a new book, Bad News on the Cost of Living Crisis and to discuss questions of media power, resistance, and the future of journalism in a rapidly evolving digital media landscape with special guest Laura Webster.
Both the book and magazine will be available for purchase at the event – to ensure you get a copy of the Red Pepper issue, you can purchase in advance for a discounted rate when registering for the event!
Join us from 5:30pm in the Reading Room, Glasgow University Union – the discussion will run between 6:00 and 7:30pm, with drinks and further conversation in the Reading Room bar afterwards.
Chair:
Darcy White is a co-editor of Red Pepper Media and Emeritus Fellow of Visual Culture (Sheffield Hallam University).
Panellists:
Laura Webster is the Editor of The National.
Catherine Happer is a Professor of Media Sociology (University of Glasgow) and Director of The Glasgow University Media Group.
Lluis De Nadal is a Lecturer in Media, Culture & Society (University of Glasgow) and a researcher at The Glasgow University Media Group.
Paula Lacey is a co-editor of Red Pepper Media and a PhD candidate in Sociology (University of Cambridge)
Location
Reading Room, Glasgow University Union (GUU), University Avenue, G12 8LX
I am a contributor to a Glasgow University Media Group book published last week. Bad news on the cost of living crisis explores media representations and audience responses to the COLC in the United Kingdom over the past few years.
The blurb of the book is below:
In this book, the Glasgow University Media Group bring their innovative and forensic three-dimensional methodological approach to understanding the role of media in shaping Britain’s cost of living crisis. In the context of neoliberal austerity, welfare cuts and the corporate capture of media platforms, itprovides evidence ofan increasing disconnect between the narratives promoted by the mainstream media and the interests, priorities and lived experiences of audiences – whilst charting the parallel emergence of new models of trust which leave them vulnerable to bad faith actors promoting disinformation online.
Big thanks to GUMG colleagues Alison Eldridge, Catherine Happer, Gavin Hawkton, Isaac Hoff, Lluis de Nadal Alsina, Cairsti Russell and Yu Sun for their hard work in bringing this to fruition. I would also like to thank the Palgrave team (especially Richard Woolley) and the reviewers for their assistance in publishing this important work.
Yesterday I delivered a guest lecture on the Media and Politics undergraduate course run by the University of Edinburgh.
I discussed the mediated nature of flag protests, with a specific focus on my work on the 2013 union flag protests in Northern Ireland, the connective actions of far right movements and the recent anti-immigration protests in the UK. A synopsis of the session is below:
We also discussed the role of media (both legacy and digital) and discourse elites in mainstreaming far right policies around issues like immigration. Relevant concepts such as the illiberal public sphere were introduced to explain what the implications of these trends might be for democratic institutions.
Big thanks to Professor Kate Wright (Edinburgh) for the invitation and to the students for their contributions during the class. A copy of the slides can be found below.
Yesterday I gave an invited presentation at an event entitled ‘Memory, Conflict & Peace’. It was organised by the University of Glasgow’s Memory Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative exploring how memories are made, stored and retrieved by individuals.
Featuring a keynote by Prof. Ann Rigney (Utrecht University), the event considered how memory contributes to conflict. It addressed questions such as: How do official narratives sustain nationalism and preparedness for war? In what ways do digital media amplify, reshape, or contest memories of past violence? What can we learn from societies where memory of division remains a site of contestation?
My paper was called Random Access Memories or clichéd representations? How historical photographs of the Troubles are interpreted on Instagram. This was based on my previous article published in the journal Information, Communication & Society,
Yesterday, I delivered a presentation at a symposium. The symposium, Leading Curriculum and Assessment Innovation, was organised by the University of Glasgow’s Teaching Excellence Network.
My presentation was titled ‘ Is a dissertation the best way to assess international students? Developing the MCS Independent Research Project’. I discussed the challenges I faced developing and implementing the IRP over the past few years. These challenges ranged from training staff and students to the workload implications of adopting this new model.
Thanks to Julia, Honor and Errol for organising the symposium, and the other participants for their inspiring contributions.
I have an entry in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication, which was published this week.
In ‘Belief Echoes’, I explore how and why people continue to believe false information. This occurs even when the information has been debunked or fact-checked. I draw on examples from my own research on Northern Ireland and the COVID-19 pandemic. These examples show that a small proportion of the population often remain within epistemic bunkers. These bunkers revolve around misinformation and half-truths.
Many thanks to the editors (Alessandro Nai, Max Grömping, and Dominique Wirz). They worked hard to bring together the 430+ entries from 570+ authors in the Encyclopedia.
The preprint version of my entry can be read here.
