Riding Information Crises: The Performance of Far-Right Twitter Users in Australia During the 2019–20 Bushfires and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This paper focuses on the performance of the far-right community in the Australian Twittersphere during two information crises: the 2019-20 Australian bushfires and the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Using a mixed method approach to analysing the performance of far-right accounts active in both crises, and using an information disorder index to estimate the quality of information being shared on Twitter during the two events, we found that far-right accounts moved from the periphery of these disaster-driven conversations during the Australian bushfires to assume a more central location during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that an increase in information disorder and overperformance of far-right accounts during COVID-19 is suggestive of an association between the two, which warrants further investigation.

Keywords: Far-right; Twitter; Australian Bushfires; COVID-19; Network analysis; Information crisis; Epistemic crisis; Coordinated inauthentic behavior