Recent research on conspiracy theories labels conspiracism as a distinct and deficient epistemic process. However, the tendency to pathologize conspiracism obscures the fact that it is a diverse and dynamic collective sensemaking process, transacted in public on the web. Here, we adopt a narrative framework to introduce a new analytical approach for examining online conspiracism. Narrative plays an important role because it is central to human cognition as well as being domain agnostic, and so can serve as a bridge between conspiracism and other modes of knowledge production. To illustrate the utility of our approach, we use it to analyze conspiracy theories identified in conversations across three different anti-vaccination discussion forums. Our approach enables us to capture more abstract categories without hiding the underlying diversity of the raw data. We find that there are dominant narrative themes across sites, but that there is also a tremendous amount of diversity within these themes. Our initial observations raise the possibility that different communities play different roles in the collective construction of conspiracy theories online. This offers one potential route for understanding not only cross-sectional differentiation, but the longitudinal dynamics of the narrative in future work. In particular, we are interested to examine how activity within the framework of the narrative shifts in response to news events and social media platforms' nascent efforts to control different types of misinformation. Such analysis will help us to better understand how collectively constructed conspiracy narratives adapt in a shifting media ecosystem.

While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on several themes, including castigating them for malicious gatekeeping, for being out of touch with the views of the public, and for being a bully. Only Trump routinely attacks the news media for trafficking in falsehoods and for colluding with other interests to attack his candidacy. Our findings highlight the ways that candidates instrumentalize the news media for their own rhetorical purposes; further constructing the news media as harmful to democracy.

Traditional approaches to research agenda-setting focus on researchers and their ability to review and synthesize literature, identify gaps, prioritize their ideas, and find the resources to make them a reality. Recent initiatives in medical research have shifted the focus away from the researcher to other stakeholders. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with medical researchers, we illustrate both the traditional researcher-centric as well as the novel patient-centric approaches. The patient-centric approach allows patients to contribute their diverse perspectives and pose unique questions, which can direct more impactful research agenda-setting. This paper provides insights into how medical research agendas are established, what factors impact decision-making and how an innovative use of crowdsourcing can refocus attention on the patient and their needs.

We would like to thank our interview participants for taking the time to speak with us and providing such valuable insights into their work. We would also like to thank the whole Illuminating 2020 team for the hard work the team put in to create the tool we used in this study.

Back to the future with machine learningDrug repurposing provides a way to identify effective treatments more quickly and economically. To speed up the search for antiviral treatment of COVID-19, a new platform provides a range of computational models to identify drugs with potential anti-COVID-19 effects.