iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Had a fantastic week in Montignac-Lascaux to celebrate completing my PhD 🇫🇷 Enjoyed canoeing 20km of the Vézère river, visiting Montignac’s Distillerie de l’Òrt, and soaking up the French sun ☀️

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Delighted to announce that I’ll be starting as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Media and International Directorate in the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS)! I’ll be working on BBC policy, including the upcoming BBC Charter Review, and I’m looking forward to helping shape UK media policy.

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Happy to say that today I passed my PhD viva with no corrections at Lancaster University! Thanks to @journolinguist.bsky.social and @karinpt.bsky.social for being fantastic external and internal examiners, and to my supervisor @drclaireh.bsky.social for helping me get here.

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

New from me 🚨 “Disinformation and Algorithms: Amplification, Reception and Correction” I contribute to the theory around disinformation and misinformation studies and then carry out a corpus-based analysis of the use of tokens like ‘disinformation’ on Twitter. www.cambridge.org/universitypr...

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Spotted a lot of April Fools’ Day activity from brands and organisations on social media yesterday. Strikingly, the only one I encountered that didn’t use genAI images was this from the British Transport Police. Shows another way in which genAI has become the first port of call for ease and cost.

A tweet from the British Transport Police that reads: Today we’re announcing new measures which will see the mandatory removal of outdoor footwear on the railway.

The groundbreaking step is being introduced following a surge in reports to our text 61016 service of people putting their feet on seats.

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

We’re experiencing an interesting phenomenon here: There is a Pikachu-themed activist in the demonstrations in Türkiye, but the visual used here (and elsewhere) is AI generated. This blending of legitimate and fabricated content further complicates what people can believe online.

A screenshot of a tweet with 4.4 million views showing an AI generated image of a person dressed as Pikachu wielding a Turkish flag during protests.

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

I talked about the social and technical factors that contribute to belief in celebrity misinformation to @theathletic.bsky.social/ @nytimes.com and how it’s often family members and people associated with celebrities who end up the targets of false information too. www.nytimes.com/athletic/613...

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

I was just on BBC Radio Wales talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement regarding moderation and fact checking on Meta platforms, and how he is embracing the ‘Musk approach’. Here’s a clip and you can hear the full 6 minute interview on my blog: fakebelieve.blog/media-engage...

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

It’s available on my blog (@fakebelieveblog.bsky.social) as a PDF or PNG and I’ve also made it available as individual tiles, alongside the larger infographic. #disinformation

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Here’s a simple explainer for kids on how to navigate and understand (dis)information online. It teaches kids how to process information online, reiterating the specific things that they can do when on social media and the wider internet. #DigitalLiteracy Find it at: fakebelieve.blog/resources/

FIGHTING THE FAKES
STRATEGIES
Made by William Dance
THINK BEFORE YOU CLICK
Before diving into something that seems true, stop and think If something makes you feel happy, shocked, scared, excited, or even angry, it might be trying to do that on purpose. A simple test is: could you prove this is real to someone else?
CHECK THE SOURCE
Have you heard of this account before? Is it from a website you recognise? Is it a clear photo, or a blurry, grainy meme? If you can't easily find out who made it, it might be because theyre trying to hide it.
Always check who is saying what.
FIND A FACT CHECK
Not sure about something? There's people to help you with that! Fact checkers are people who write about popular posts and stories and investigate whether theyre true. A popular one is called Snopes.
FALLEN FOR A FAKE?
All of us have fallen for something fake before, it happens to everyone. If this happens to you it's okay to admit you've got something wrong.
It means that now you're well prepared for when other people see it too.
www.fakebelieve.blog/resources

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I have a few of these on my blog now, and they’re free to access and redistribute for anyone who wants to use them. #disinformation

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I thought I'd make a new explainer for my blog (@fakebelieveblog.bsky.social). For this one l've focused on hostile-state information operations (HSIOs). The explainer is available as a PNG or PDF from my blog as a whole, or as individual tiles, here: fakebelieve.blog/resources/

HOSTILE-STATE INFORMATION OPERATIONS
Created by William Dance (@williampdance)
WHAT IS AN HSIO?
A hostile-state information operation (or 'HSIO') is the employment of information-related capabilities to influence and disrupt adversaries.
DIFFERENT NAMES
HSIOs have many other names. These include terms such as information warfare and influence operations (IW/IO), influence cyber operations (ICOs), information activities, foreign information operations (FIOs), information warfare, and others.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
HSIOs are characterised by being executed at the state level or at the instruction of the state, and can target groups inside or outside the country they originate from.
They are the adversarial deployment of information to harm others.
CASE STUDY: RUSSIA
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a private company in St Petersburg, Russia.
The IRA fulfils government contracts and is the online propaganda arm of the Kremlin.
Workers are paid to fulfil quotas of social media posts, pretending to be politically-engaged residents of the target country.
QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
HSIOs are not always well-refined operations and can be experimental. For example, 'zone flooding is a discursive practice where adversaries overload online information spaces to make it more difficult to access legitimate information and make decisions.
For more resources, visit www.fakebelieve.blog/resources and follow @FakeBelieveBlog.

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Dr William Dance @williamdance.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Unlike X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, BlueSky allows users to input free text when reporting content on its platform. At the moment it benefits from a relatively small user base (15 million) and therefore can handle safety better, but it’ll be interesting to see if this stays as it grows.

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