Edward Hurcombe
Biographic Data
| ID | 336770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edward Hurcombe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edward |
| FAMILY NAME | Hurcombe |
| SIGNATURE | HURCOMBE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queensland University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5838-2019 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 156 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
IAMCR 2025, ‘Communicating Environmental Justice: Many Voices, One Planet’, Singapore, 13–17 July 2025
This report covers the International Association of Media and Communication Research ( IAMCR ) conference 2025 at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It provides a snapshot of papers from more than 350 parallel sessions under the theme ‘Communicating Environmental Justice: Many Voices, One Planet’. These reflections from three attendees identify key themes that emerged across the a…
The discursive function of Meta’s Newsroom: How Meta frames the problem of problematic online content
This article examines the social technology company Meta’s public communication on problematic content, via their official ‘Meta Newsroom’, within the context of growing regulatory scrutiny. For nearly a decade, the Meta Newsroom has been a major outlet for Meta company announcements, and since 2016, the Newsroom has increasingly become a key source for company responses to concerns regarding mis/disinformation and other kinds of problematic cont…
Aanzca2024: A moment to pause
In this special issue emerging from the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand (AANZCA) 2024 conference, we bring together a range of articles that demonstrate the value and necessity of pausing as a discipline to respond to the complex political and social conditions within which our research is shaped and produced
Conceptualising the “Newsfluencer: Intersecting Trajectories in Online Content Creation and Platformatised Journalism
Big Lies: Understanding the Role of Political Actors and Mainstream Journalists in the Spread of Disinformation
Much of the scholarly attention on disinformation has focussed on the role of social media, thus overlooking the political actors who themselves propagate disinformation and the mainstream news outlets that report on them. In this article we argue that disinformation has now become so widespread because outright lies are an effective way for political actors to attract and manage public attention. Political strategists have likewise worked out th…
Computational Communication Methods for Examining Problematic News-Sharing Practices on Facebook at Scale
Social media, in general, and Facebook in particular, have been clearly identified as important platforms for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and related problematic content. However, the patterns and processes of such dissemination are still not sufficiently understood. We detail a novel computational methodology that focusses on the identification of high-profile vectors of 'fake news' and other problematic information in public Fa…
Covering Conspiracy: Approaches to Reporting the Covid/5G Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy theories about the ‘real’ origins of the coronavirus have co-evolved with media coverage of the COVID-19 crisis itself; the World Health Organization now warns about a global “infodemic” paralleling the viral pandemic. Covering these conspiracy theories presents difficult editorial choices for news organizations. This article examines how diverse news outlets chose to report on one key COVID-19 conspiracy theory: the (entirely unfounde…
Global Platforms and Local Networks: An Institutional Account of the Australian News Media Bargaining Code
In recent years, researchers have scrutinised the power of digital platforms in the news industry. However, while digital platforms are powerful actors, there is a tendency to emphasise this power at the expense of other institutions. In this chapter we examine the critical role that government, regulatory authorities and the news media played in developing the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. We explore how …
Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT ’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit
This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of inf…
Australia’s Digi Code: What can we learn from the EU experience
Disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms are growing regulatory concerns for governments. In this paper, we examine Australia's DIGI Code of Practice (CoP). The CoP is a voluntary set of commitments to address false content on platforms that is overseen by Australia's digital media industry. It was established in response to a federal government directive. We evaluate the DIGI CoP by comparing it to the code it was partially ba…
Managing problematic visual media in natural hazard emergencies
In natural hazard emergencies, visual media (images, videos) document and convey the possible risk, impact, and severity of the hazard. Issues arise when the visuals being circulated, at scale and speed, are manipulated, fake, or are from an unrelated event or location. These problematic visuals can impact how communities interpret the risk of an emergency. Further, when visual media present information (i.e. a cue) in conflict with what an emerg…
‘Fake News’ and Other Problematic Information: Studying Dissemination and Discourse Patterns
Encompassed by the disputed term ‘fake news’, a variety of overtly or covertly biased, skewed, or falsified reports claiming to present factual information are now seen to constitute a critical challenge to the effective dissemination of news and information across established and emerging democratic societies. Such content – variously also classifiable as propaganda, selective reporting, conspiracy theory, inadvertent misinformation, and deliber…
Australia’s Big Gamble: The News Media Bargaining Code and the Responses From Google and Facebook
Responding rapidly to extraordinary developments in early 2021, this panel examines the background, development, implementation, and consequences of the latest Australian regulatory intervention in the engagement between content platforms and domestic media organisations: the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The Australian federal government envisioned the NMBC as “a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Austr…
Digital Journalism as Symptom, Response, and Agent of Change in the Platformed Media Environment
This article brings together perspectives from digital media studies and journalism scholarship to propose a working definition of digital journalism that can guide scholarship and applied research in this field. We define digital journalism as “those practices of newsgathering, reporting, textual production and ancillary communication that reflect, respond to, and shape the social, cultural and economic logics of the constantly changing digital …
IStandWithDan versus #DictatorDan: The polarised dynamics of Twitter discussions about Victoria’s Covid-19 restrictions
In this article, we examine two interrelated hashtag campaigns that formed in response to the Victorian State Government’s handling of Australia’s most significant COVID-19 second wave of mid-to-late 2020. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes descriptive statistical analysis, qualitative content analysis, network analysis, computational sentiment analysis and social bot detection, we reveal how a small number of hyper-partisan pro- and …
The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media
Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is less interested in news. However, the field is still trying to understand the long-term impacts of this change for news publishers. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are becoming concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In parti…
Examining the Role and Significance of Emerging Social News Outlets and Their Advocacy Journalism in the 2017 Australian Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey
This paper examines emerging news forms and journalistic practices within Australia that are native to social media. It argues that these shared forms and practices constitute a new genre of ‘social news’. Social news embodies specific kinds of platform vernaculars and pop-cultural sensibilities, and challenges journalistic norms of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ by consistently adopting an overtly positioned perspective. Three Australian-based outl…
Visual Mis/disinformation in Journalism and Public Communications: Current Verification Practices, Challenges, and Future Opportunities
Social media platforms and news organisations alike are struggling with identifying and combating visual mis/disinformation presented to their audiences. Such processes are complicated due to the enormous number of media items being produced, how quickly media items spread, and the often-subtle or sometimes invisible-to-the-naked-eye nature of deceptive edits. Despite knowing little about the provenance and veracity of the visual content they enc…
Facebook, news media and platform dependency: The institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms
There is a growing concern around the dependency of news organisations on platforms like Facebook for audience traffic. However, scholars are still working out the extent of this dependency and how it manifests in practice. In this article, we draw on interviews with Australian news professionals and industry fieldwork to provide a nuanced account of this phenomenon. We find that news media organisations have recently started to diversify their d…
Corona? 5G? or both: The dynamics of Covid-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook
Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dissemination of the rum…
What’s newsworthy about ‘social news’? Characteristics and potential of an emerging genre
This article describes the emerging genre of ‘social news’ – characterised by a ‘born-digital’ form of journalism which is both symptomatic of and a pragmatic response to the logics of social media. The article outlines the genre’s key formal characteristics, illustrating them through discussions of three key Australia-based publications – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee , and Pedestrian.tv . The analysis of these examples indicates that social news dep…
Facebook, news media and platform dependency: The institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms
There is a growing concern around the dependency of news organisations on platforms like Facebook for audience traffic. However, scholars are still working out the extent of this dependency and how it manifests in practice. In this article, we draw on interviews with Australian news professionals and industry fieldwork to provide a nuanced account of this phenomenon. We find that news media organisations have recently started to diversify their d…
Corona? 5G? or both: The dynamics of Covid-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook
Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dissemination of the rum…
What’s newsworthy about ‘social news’? Characteristics and potential of an emerging genre
This article describes the emerging genre of ‘social news’ – characterised by a ‘born-digital’ form of journalism which is both symptomatic of and a pragmatic response to the logics of social media. The article outlines the genre’s key formal characteristics, illustrating them through discussions of three key Australia-based publications – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee , and Pedestrian.tv . The analysis of these examples indicates that social news dep…
Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT ’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit
This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of inf…
Visual Mis/disinformation in Journalism and Public Communications: Current Verification Practices, Challenges, and Future Opportunities
Social media platforms and news organisations alike are struggling with identifying and combating visual mis/disinformation presented to their audiences. Such processes are complicated due to the enormous number of media items being produced, how quickly media items spread, and the often-subtle or sometimes invisible-to-the-naked-eye nature of deceptive edits. Despite knowing little about the provenance and veracity of the visual content they enc…
The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media
Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is less interested in news. However, the field is still trying to understand the long-term impacts of this change for news publishers. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are becoming concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In parti…
Conceptualising the “Newsfluencer: Intersecting Trajectories in Online Content Creation and Platformatised Journalism
IStandWithDan versus #DictatorDan: The polarised dynamics of Twitter discussions about Victoria’s Covid-19 restrictions
In this article, we examine two interrelated hashtag campaigns that formed in response to the Victorian State Government’s handling of Australia’s most significant COVID-19 second wave of mid-to-late 2020. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes descriptive statistical analysis, qualitative content analysis, network analysis, computational sentiment analysis and social bot detection, we reveal how a small number of hyper-partisan pro- and …
Australia’s Digi Code: What can we learn from the EU experience
Disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms are growing regulatory concerns for governments. In this paper, we examine Australia's DIGI Code of Practice (CoP). The CoP is a voluntary set of commitments to address false content on platforms that is overseen by Australia's digital media industry. It was established in response to a federal government directive. We evaluate the DIGI CoP by comparing it to the code it was partially ba…
Computational Communication Methods for Examining Problematic News-Sharing Practices on Facebook at Scale
Social media, in general, and Facebook in particular, have been clearly identified as important platforms for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and related problematic content. However, the patterns and processes of such dissemination are still not sufficiently understood. We detail a novel computational methodology that focusses on the identification of high-profile vectors of 'fake news' and other problematic information in public Fa…
What’s newsworthy about ‘social news’? Characteristics and potential of an emerging genre
This article describes the emerging genre of ‘social news’ – characterised by a ‘born-digital’ form of journalism which is both symptomatic of and a pragmatic response to the logics of social media. The article outlines the genre’s key formal characteristics, illustrating them through discussions of three key Australia-based publications – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee , and Pedestrian.tv . The analysis of these examples indicates that social news dep…
Examining the Role and Significance of Emerging Social News Outlets and Their Advocacy Journalism in the 2017 Australian Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey
This paper examines emerging news forms and journalistic practices within Australia that are native to social media. It argues that these shared forms and practices constitute a new genre of ‘social news’. Social news embodies specific kinds of platform vernaculars and pop-cultural sensibilities, and challenges journalistic norms of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ by consistently adopting an overtly positioned perspective. Three Australian-based outl…
Visual Mis/disinformation in Journalism and Public Communications: Current Verification Practices, Challenges, and Future Opportunities
Social media platforms and news organisations alike are struggling with identifying and combating visual mis/disinformation presented to their audiences. Such processes are complicated due to the enormous number of media items being produced, how quickly media items spread, and the often-subtle or sometimes invisible-to-the-naked-eye nature of deceptive edits. Despite knowing little about the provenance and veracity of the visual content they enc…
Facebook, news media and platform dependency: The institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms
There is a growing concern around the dependency of news organisations on platforms like Facebook for audience traffic. However, scholars are still working out the extent of this dependency and how it manifests in practice. In this article, we draw on interviews with Australian news professionals and industry fieldwork to provide a nuanced account of this phenomenon. We find that news media organisations have recently started to diversify their d…
Corona? 5G? or both: The dynamics of Covid-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook
Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dissemination of the rum…
Managing problematic visual media in natural hazard emergencies
In natural hazard emergencies, visual media (images, videos) document and convey the possible risk, impact, and severity of the hazard. Issues arise when the visuals being circulated, at scale and speed, are manipulated, fake, or are from an unrelated event or location. These problematic visuals can impact how communities interpret the risk of an emergency. Further, when visual media present information (i.e. a cue) in conflict with what an emerg…
‘Fake News’ and Other Problematic Information: Studying Dissemination and Discourse Patterns
Encompassed by the disputed term ‘fake news’, a variety of overtly or covertly biased, skewed, or falsified reports claiming to present factual information are now seen to constitute a critical challenge to the effective dissemination of news and information across established and emerging democratic societies. Such content – variously also classifiable as propaganda, selective reporting, conspiracy theory, inadvertent misinformation, and deliber…
Australia’s Big Gamble: The News Media Bargaining Code and the Responses From Google and Facebook
Responding rapidly to extraordinary developments in early 2021, this panel examines the background, development, implementation, and consequences of the latest Australian regulatory intervention in the engagement between content platforms and domestic media organisations: the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The Australian federal government envisioned the NMBC as “a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Austr…
Digital Journalism as Symptom, Response, and Agent of Change in the Platformed Media Environment
This article brings together perspectives from digital media studies and journalism scholarship to propose a working definition of digital journalism that can guide scholarship and applied research in this field. We define digital journalism as “those practices of newsgathering, reporting, textual production and ancillary communication that reflect, respond to, and shape the social, cultural and economic logics of the constantly changing digital …
IStandWithDan versus #DictatorDan: The polarised dynamics of Twitter discussions about Victoria’s Covid-19 restrictions
In this article, we examine two interrelated hashtag campaigns that formed in response to the Victorian State Government’s handling of Australia’s most significant COVID-19 second wave of mid-to-late 2020. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes descriptive statistical analysis, qualitative content analysis, network analysis, computational sentiment analysis and social bot detection, we reveal how a small number of hyper-partisan pro- and …
The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media
Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is less interested in news. However, the field is still trying to understand the long-term impacts of this change for news publishers. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are becoming concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In parti…
Covering Conspiracy: Approaches to Reporting the Covid/5G Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy theories about the ‘real’ origins of the coronavirus have co-evolved with media coverage of the COVID-19 crisis itself; the World Health Organization now warns about a global “infodemic” paralleling the viral pandemic. Covering these conspiracy theories presents difficult editorial choices for news organizations. This article examines how diverse news outlets chose to report on one key COVID-19 conspiracy theory: the (entirely unfounde…
Global Platforms and Local Networks: An Institutional Account of the Australian News Media Bargaining Code
In recent years, researchers have scrutinised the power of digital platforms in the news industry. However, while digital platforms are powerful actors, there is a tendency to emphasise this power at the expense of other institutions. In this chapter we examine the critical role that government, regulatory authorities and the news media played in developing the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. We explore how …
Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT ’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit
This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of inf…
Australia’s Digi Code: What can we learn from the EU experience
Disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms are growing regulatory concerns for governments. In this paper, we examine Australia's DIGI Code of Practice (CoP). The CoP is a voluntary set of commitments to address false content on platforms that is overseen by Australia's digital media industry. It was established in response to a federal government directive. We evaluate the DIGI CoP by comparing it to the code it was partially ba…
Computational Communication Methods for Examining Problematic News-Sharing Practices on Facebook at Scale
Social media, in general, and Facebook in particular, have been clearly identified as important platforms for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and related problematic content. However, the patterns and processes of such dissemination are still not sufficiently understood. We detail a novel computational methodology that focusses on the identification of high-profile vectors of 'fake news' and other problematic information in public Fa…
Conceptualising the “Newsfluencer: Intersecting Trajectories in Online Content Creation and Platformatised Journalism
Big Lies: Understanding the Role of Political Actors and Mainstream Journalists in the Spread of Disinformation
Much of the scholarly attention on disinformation has focussed on the role of social media, thus overlooking the political actors who themselves propagate disinformation and the mainstream news outlets that report on them. In this article we argue that disinformation has now become so widespread because outright lies are an effective way for political actors to attract and manage public attention. Political strategists have likewise worked out th…
The discursive function of Meta’s Newsroom: How Meta frames the problem of problematic online content
This article examines the social technology company Meta’s public communication on problematic content, via their official ‘Meta Newsroom’, within the context of growing regulatory scrutiny. For nearly a decade, the Meta Newsroom has been a major outlet for Meta company announcements, and since 2016, the Newsroom has increasingly become a key source for company responses to concerns regarding mis/disinformation and other kinds of problematic cont…
Aanzca2024: A moment to pause
In this special issue emerging from the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand (AANZCA) 2024 conference, we bring together a range of articles that demonstrate the value and necessity of pausing as a discipline to respond to the complex political and social conditions within which our research is shaped and produced
IAMCR 2025, ‘Communicating Environmental Justice: Many Voices, One Planet’, Singapore, 13–17 July 2025
This report covers the International Association of Media and Communication Research ( IAMCR ) conference 2025 at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It provides a snapshot of papers from more than 350 parallel sessions under the theme ‘Communicating Environmental Justice: Many Voices, One Planet’. These reflections from three attendees identify key themes that emerged across the a…
Political science (17 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Social media (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (8 works)