The Fighting Harmful Online Communication Hallmark Research Initiative coordinates interdisciplinary research on the harms resulting from mistaken, misleading, exaggerated, polemic and deliberately false online communications, bringing together researchers from HASS and STEM to pursue an innovative approach to the problem.
About
False and fake information, disinformation campaigns, conspiracy, polarisation and extremism are undermining democratic politics and social cohesion globally. They are associated with harmful communications, social media, widespread mistrust in institutions, and attempts to manipulate public opinion for political or personal gain. The focus of this project is to identify, study, and reduce the harm that results from these phenomena.
In January 2023, the government empowered the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to combat harmful online misinformation and disinformation and instructed the Department of Home Affairs to establish the Strengthening Democracy Taskforce. However harmful online communication continues to undermine national and local democracies and their elections, public debate, public health, environmental action, and investor confidence.
The rapid development and release of generative AI models, many of which are capable of replicating misinformation at an unprecedented speed and on a vast scale, threatens to make things far worse. To date, efforts to respond to this crisis have proved largely ineffective.
Harmful online communication is a complex problem that demands a comprehensive social and technical response.
Importantly, the Fighting Harmful Online Communication HRI is developing a conceptual and practical framework to coordinate research between different faculties and methodologies. To establish common ground for analysis and problem-solving, this framework includes concepts, methods, and a suite of technologies to support data-intensive research, connecting disciplines in both the understanding and the solution-oriented study of the communication crises.
The initiative brings together University of Melbourne researchers focusing on communications, psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence (AI), linguistics, and human language processing technology to address the enormous complexity of the information crisis.
The University has several teams pursuing measures to counteract harmful online communication in both HASS and STEM faculties. These researchers are discipline leaders delivering high quality and innovative research to identify, understand, and combat harmful online communications. This expertise is unique in Australia for both its diversity and proven excellence. At present that work is largely focused within faculties and there is neither the apparatus nor the resources to connect these researchers and to combine their expertise. The initiative works both to connect these researchers and to develop a framework to incentivise and support new collaborations, creating the potential for a more comprehensive, more innovative, and more effective response. It is a strategic first step on a path to develop the University of Melbourne as a national centre of excellence in this area.
Objectives
Three strategic objectives inform the work of the Fighting Harmful Online Communications Hallmark Research Initiative. Overall, these three objectives will jointly lead to the development of successful proposals to fund multidisciplinary research around the general theme of harmful online communications. The objectives are:
Capacity building: the initiative will ensure that scientific and computational responses to mis- and disinformation are responsive to the complexities of psychological, technological and social systems. It will do this by establishing a framework to facilitate collaboration between HASS and STEM researchers. This framework will ensure that HASS researchers will benefit from social network analysis tools, social media simulators, computational modelling tools and other advanced quantitative research tools. In return, HASS researchers will ground the research and will actively work with the STEM researchers to ensure that the research addresses and speaks to the complexities, constraints, and nuances of real-worl nnd phenomena.
External collaboration: objective two builds upon the first objective but expands beyond the University of Melbourne, establishing collaborations with key teams external to the University, ensuring that this project can draw upon the full strength of Australian research in this area. To ensure that this objective is achieved, we will partner closely with the Information and Influence Hub (co-chaired by Howe), which is a group of researchers, many of them external to the University of Melbourne, who meet monthly and actively collaborate in this space.
New techniques, methods and practices: objective three targets research impact by developing new technologies, new methods, and new practices to benefit the public. It will report on these methods and the state of misinformation research in Harmful Online Communications Australia for publication in year three of the initiative.
Outcomes
- Research incubator workshops
- Theoretical products — definitions and models of psycho-social effects of communication
- Technical products — software, data, and studies tested in a controlled social media environment
- Papers, data, and software around harmful communications in Australia and the world
- Ideas for proposals to national and international funding agencies
Research themes
Radicalising information
This research focus will support projects which seek to expand understanding of the link between internet communication and interactions with affinity groups that serve to strengthen and reinforce extreme beliefs. Recent advances in natural language processing, such as large language models, have created an unprecedented ability for monitoring and predictive modelling based on text-based interactions. Several of our researchers have substantial expertise in these areas, which we aim to leverage to produce technical tools to aid in the diagnosis and combating of radicalising information.
Critical information research
A key challenge within harmful communication research is understanding how social and cultural context alters the meaning of information. The initiative will facilitate collaborations between critical communication researchers and those working on the meaning of text in the computational sciences. Collaborations will focus on relationships between affinity groups and particular modes of discourse and will inform the application of technical tools, the analysis of radicalising information and improve experimental designs for the sandbox (see below).
Experimental environment: the Information Sandbox
Most studies of online communication have been primarily observational and thus correlational in nature, limiting the degree to which causality can be inferred. The initiative will champion a virtual social-media platform, deployed on an access-controlled Mastodon server, that allows psychological and computational researchers to replicate key elements of social media communication through experiments in a controlled environment. This will allow us to better understand how the narrative structures collectively emerge and evolve, and to what degree these change people’s opinions, beliefs and likely actions.
People
HRI Initiative Structure
The initiative has two chairs, Howe and Hovy, and two Convenors, de Kock and Pond. An Advisory Board that meets quarterly provides oversight, suggestions, and introduces connections to researchers around the university and wider.
Initiative Co-Chairs
Professor Eduard Hovy (Co-Chair, FEIT)
Eduard Hovy is the Executive Director of Melbourne Connect, a professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems, and a research professor at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on computational semantics of language. Dr Hovy has worked on several projects that infer the psycho-social context of authors from their text, such as group role discovery in online forums, detection of slavery of runaway children, and affinity group or belief system discovery.
Associate Professor Piers Howe (Co-Chair), MDHS
Piers Howe researches the causes and potential solutions to the online communication crisis, particularly on social media. He helps lead a DFAT funded counter-misinformation education program for the Philippines. He coordinates an annual joint DST/University of Melbourne conference on combatting mis/disinformation. He is a member of the International Panel of the Information Environment (IPIE) and co-chairs the Information and Influence Hub.
Academic Co-Convenors
Dr Philip Pond (Co-Academic Convenor), Arts
Philip Pond is a DECRA Fellow investigating the temporal dimensions of the communication crisis. He leads a Discovery Project on Australian extremism, is a member of international communication research networks and convenor of the SCC Early Career Researcher network. He has written two books on the subject of disinformation and its threat to democracy.
Dr Christine de Kock (Co-Academic Convenor), FEIT
Christine de Kock is a postdoctoral research fellow and associate lecturer in computer science and natural language processing. She completed her PhD at Cambridge University on online disagreements, with a focus on community dynamics within the Wikipedia editor network. Her current research focuses on online extremist communities and mis/disinformation.
Wider research team
Dr Jennifer Beckett, Arts
Jennifer Beckett researches the structures and governance of online communities. She has a particular interest in understanding how extremist communities such as Incels, function. Dr Beckett is currently a chief investigator on the ARC Discovery project Addressing Online Hostility in Australian Digital Cultures (DP230100870). A former professional community manager, she is also a founding member of Australian Community Managers, the peak professional body for community managers in the country.
Dr Khandis Blake, MDHS
Khandis Blake an expert on the psychology of gender relations who uses nature/nurture frameworks to understand conflict and competition. Her research addresses big issues that profoundly influence people’s mental, social and economic wellbeing, including sexual conflict, female competitiveness, female and male empowerment, and intimate partner violence. The ultimate guiding principle of her work is to understand how insights from psychology and biology can be used to promote gender equity.
Professor Mark Davis, Arts
Mark Davis is Head of Media and Communication and chief investigator on five nationally funded grants focused on online culture wars, extremism, and the impact of online 'anti-publics' on public culture, such as white supremacist groups, 'men's rights' groups, anti-climate science groups, and anti-vaccination groups.
Associate Professor Andrew Dodd, Arts
Andrew Dodd is Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ), which works to foster and encourage journalism to encourage informed and engaged citizens. CAJ is the university hub of journalism research and teaching and a key partner for delivering knowledge and training to practising and aspiring journalists.
Dr Darrin Durant, Arts
Darrin Durant's research focuses on disputes between experts and the public and the impacts on democracy of disinformation and misinformation. He holds a major research grant with Canadian researchers, funded by SSHRC, which is studying the impact of disinformation on political deliberation.
Dr Sofya Glazunova, Arts
Sofya Glazunova is an early career researcher with a burgeoning and highly relevant research profile. She studies digital activism in authoritarian contexts and state-controlled media such as RT and Sputnik. She was a Postdoc at QUT Digital Media Research Centre, from where she led a joint industry report on the risks of disinformation for Australian news media.
Dr Auguste Harrington, MDHS
Auguste Harrington is a social psychologist studying gender and gender-based attitudes. His research examines how and why gendered attitudes emerge and persist within societies, as well as the implications of these attitudes for societal functioning and people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
Professor Shanika Karunasekera,FEIT
Shanika Karunasekera is Deputy Dean (Academic) in FEIT and an internationally recognised scholar in online analytics and data mining. She currently leads a major project investigating informational echo chambers and has a long track record of developing research collaborations with industry and government partners.
Professor Ingrid Volkmer, Arts
Ingrid Volkmer directs the Global Youth Survey for the World Health Organisation (WHO), a study of digital crisis interaction among young people. She leads the 'Global Risk Journalism Hub', a transnational network of eighty leading journalism scholars, to assess 'fake' news and disinformation during the COVID19-crisis.
Dr Ekaterina Vylomova, FEIT
Ekaterina Vylomova is an expert in natural language processing and computational linguistics. Her current research focuses on computational approaches to language studies as well as computational social science, with a focus on quantitative evaluation of diachronic and cross-linguistic lexical semantic changes in the fields of culture and psychology.
Seed funding and workshops
This initiative will provide seed funding to enable select research teams to obtain pilot data and conduct preliminary studies that enable proposals for funding to complete large-scale projects.
Each seed funding round will be introduced by a workshop focusing on some aspect of harmful communication that will define the problem and bring together like-minded researchers. These researchers will self-organise to form teams with each team submitting a funding proposal to the HRI initiative. In each round, we will aim to fund one or more proposals.
Successful proposals will state what harm they address and, ideally, how they will quantify the extent to which they have addressed that harm. They will also explain how they intend to disseminate the knowledge they obtain in their pilot project to give their work genuine impact, and which organisations they will apply to for further funding once they have obtained their pilot data.
Get involved
Monthly Talks
We will organise a series of monthly talks. Check back here for the schedule soon!
Contact us
Christine de Kock christine.dekock@unimelb.edu.au
Philip Pond ppond@unimelb.edu.au
Eduard Hovy eduard.hovy@unimelb.edu.au
Piers Howe pdhowe@unimelb.edu.au
First published on 15 March 2024.
Share this article