Government & International Relations Seminar Series:

Political Epistemology on Social Media: Explaining the Creation, Use and Diffusion of Politically Contentious Knowledge Online

Presenter: Dr Francesco Bailo, University of Sydney

Hybrid event: A02, Room 441 and Zoom

This colloquium presents our research on political epistemology in the context of social media, focusing on “information disorder.” Our main goal is to develop a comprehensive theory that explores how politically charged knowledge is created, used, and spread on social media platforms. This involves understanding the multifaceted interplay of information within an epistemological network shaped by social, political, and media layers. We will conduct a large-scale social media experiment to understand these dynamics and to create applications to counter misinformation. Drawing on our study (Bailo et al., 2023) about information crises, we are also working on a practical definition and real-time measurement approach for information disorder which revolves around the likelihood of encountering consistent information to address a sense-making problem. We use this practical definition to propose a real-time measurement approach by thoroughly analysing social media statements’ relationships in terms of consistency, inconsistency, or neutrality with large language models.

Francesco Bailo is a Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. He obtained his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2017 with research on online political participation using computational methods for text and network analysis. He is interested in the use of digital and social media in politics. Before academia, he worked in development assistance for the Australian government, non-governmental organisations, and the UN. He lived in Afghanistan, Guatemala, Mauritius, and Ecuador. He has published on the role of internet technologies in political participation in Social Media + Society, Information, Communication & Society, Political Studies, and Policy Studies. Additionally, he has contributed to the field of Italian politics with publications in European Political Science, and authored a book with Palgrave on online communities during the emergence of M5S.