Citizens’ approaches to evaluating political ‘facts’ in the fake news era

Webinar Description - Wednesday 19th June, 15.00 - 16.00pm

Recent years have seen significant public discourse surrounding the concepts of ‘post-truth politics’, ‘fake news’, and ‘alternative facts’ online, with much of it focusing on ‘Brexit’ or Donald Trump’s election campaign and presidency. This webinar will reflect upon recent research into fact response, fact checking, and the journey of the political fact. This research, conducted during the 2017 UK General Election campaign, consisted of two interrelated studies: 1) an online survey of the general public (n = 538); and 2) a series of 23 electronically-assisted interviews with citizens in North-East Scotland. Both studies explored the tactics and heuristics used in evaluating the credibility of ‘facts’ presented online by Scottish political actors.

You can access the webinar via this link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/0241bba166484e469e9a7e7b2966f59d

Presenters

Rita Marcella

With over thirty years of experience as a researcher and academic in information and library science, Rita Marcella is now Professor of Information Management at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. Current research projects focus on: the building of a classification and taxonomy of information beliefs; the research impact agenda amongst senior, early and mid-career researchers in Information Science; and information behaviour in the context of post-truth politics. She is also evolving theory around information behaviour beliefs and building a network on information as a means of empowerment, information poverty and disadvantage. Previous research has focussed on information behaviour in political and business contexts. Rita has served on national and international funding panels and acts as a referee for a range of international journals and conferences. She has also held posts in senior management in universities but is now focussing on research and teaching.

Dr Graeme Baxter is a Research Fellow within the School of Creative and Cultural Business at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. His research interests include: the provision and use of government, parliamentary and citizenship information; freedom of information legislation; the provision of information during government public consultation exercises; and the use of the Internet by political parties, elected members and electoral candidates. His doctoral thesis was on the communication and exchange of information between state and stakeholders. He has a keen interest in ‘fake news’ and the credibility of information provided by political actors.

Posted by Jenny Foreman, Scottish Government Library