New Project: The Rise of Mistrust

I’m very pleased to announce that our project proposal on ‘The Rise of Mistrust: Digital Platforms and Trust in the News’ was accepted by the Australian Research Council.

The project, which will be led by Chief Investigators Sora Park and Caroline Fisher from the University of Canberra and Terry Flew and Uwe Dulleck from Queensland University of Technology, will explore the rise of mistrust in contemporary media environments in four countries (Australia, UK, Singapore and South Korea).

I will be a Partner Investigator on the project, alongside Edson Tandoc from Nanyang Technological University and Se-Uk Oh from the Korea Press Foundation.

As stated on the Australian Research Council’s website:

This project aims to investigate how trust and mistrust in news changes audiences’ behaviours as they increasingly access news through digital platforms. Observing the global crisis of trust, the project will undertake a longitudinal analysis of trust and mistrust in news, a four-country experiment that links trust and audience responses, and an in-depth qualitative study that provides specific contexts of these choices. The research will directly benefit policy makers, as it addresses questions of how to better secure trustworthy news content in an age of increasing dominance of digital platforms that algorithmically sort the range of news available to the Australian public.

The project, which received funding of $376,841 AUD will run for 3 years starting in 2021.