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26 Oct, 2023: Happy to have been invited for the third time to speak with Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden of
The China in Africa Podcast. On
this edition of the podcast, we talked about the changing nature of the CCP's mediated engagement with Africa, Latin America and beyond.
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28 Sep, 2023: Casa África invited me to present my work on foreign information manipulation and interference in Africa to members of the diplomatic corps in Madrid. The slides from a closed-door presentation can be downloaded from
here, while a recording of session open to the general public is on
YouTube.
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25 Sep, 2023: Participated in an OpenAI-led red teaming effort to assess the risks and safety profile of OpenAI models and systems. The system card with some of my recommendations is available
here.
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18 Aug, 2023: For the fifth summer in a row, I taught Quantitative Text Analysis at the IPSA-NUS Methods School in Singapore. This was the first time the course was offered in person after COVID-19. I've uploaded all the materials from the online version of the course
here.
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7 Aug, 2023: I spoke to the online magazine
The Wire China about the role of StarTimes in Africa's digital TV landscape. The news story (paywalled) is available
here. Other news stories about StarTimes that I have contributed to can be accessed
here.
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7 Aug, 2023: A new publication from the African Digital News Corpus (ADNc) project has been published in the open access journal,
Media and Communication. The paper, titled "A Computational Mapping of Online News Deserts on African News Websites" is available
here.
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17 Jul, 2023: Two years ago, Herman Wasserman and I began a partnership with Africa Check to develop new training materials to teach misinformation literacy skills to South African highschoolers. The first
fruits of this cooperation are now coming to light.
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22 Jun, 2023: The School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University hosted the second African Digital Media Research Methods Symposium (
DigiMethods 2023), where I delivered a series of workshops on using computational tools to study African digital media. The slides and materials are available
here.
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13 Jun, 2023: I was invited to present the African Digital News corpus at Bournemouth University's Department of Media and Communication's Research Process Seminar series. The slides from my talk can be downloaded from
here.
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29 May, 2023: At the ICA 2023 conference, the poster I co-presented with Melissa Tully and Frankline Matanji received a "Top Poster Award". In
this poster, we discuss preliminary findings of a project on "scams as everyday misinformation".
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24 April, 2023: The Department of Communication at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid hosted me for a week as part of the Erasmus+ teaching mobility programme. I delivered lectures on Text as Data for Data Journalists (
slides) and Reporting in East Asia (
slides). I also took part in a research seminar on.
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14 April, 2023: The
New York Times published a story about pro-Russian narratives on African news outlets, which features some of my most recent work on how Chinese media are a vehicle for Russian disinformation. The paywalled article is
here.
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30 March, 2023: I attended a workshop on "Hate and Disinformation on WhatsApp: Global Perspectives" at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, co-organized with LMU University. At the event, I presented my latest research with Herman Wasserman on political disinformation in South Africa. The slides are
here.
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16 March, 2023: I was invited to present my work on the geopolitics of disinformation at a the “Information at the speed of trust: (dis/ill/mis) information and security issues” conference organised by the Network for Strategic Analysis in Canada. The slides from my talk are available
here.
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10 March, 2023: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly has just published
a review by Trust Matsilele of
Disinformation in the Global South, my last co-authored book with Herman Wasserman.
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12 February, 2023: I spoke to
El País about the presence of Chinese media in Kenya, and about my research about StarTimes' 10,000 villages project. A
story (in Spanish) featuring some of my ongoing research on the topic has just been published.
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7 February, 2023: A review of the book
Disinformation in the Global South that I co-edited with Herman Wasserman
has just been posted on the website of
The International Journal of Press/Politics.
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1 February, 2023: A newspaper article about China's media footfrint in Africa in
La Razón fetures some of my thoughts on the influence of Chinese pay TV operator StarTimes. The article is available (in Spanish)
here.
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28 January, 2023: International Communication Gazette just published a
Special Issue titled "A Decade of China's Media Going Global: Issues and Perspectives" that I co-edited with Viv Marsh (Westerminster U) and Chris Paterson (U of Leeds). Our
Introduction can be read for free.
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12 January, 2023: I spoke about the "Geopolitics of Disinformation in Africa" at Casa África. A recording of my talk is available on
YouTube. I also spoked about the contents of the talk with
RNE and
La Provincia.
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28 December, 2022: A new paper ("¿Se acumula capital social en Asia oriental con el uso de las redes sociales? Inferencia causal estadística con datos del Asian Barometer Survey") that I wrote with Tetsuro Kobayashi, at City University of Hong Kong, has been published Open Access in
Revista Internacional de Sociología.
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13 December, 2022: The journal
Online Media and Global Communication just published the article "How effective are Chinese media in shaping audiences’ attitudes towards China? A survey analysis in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa" that I co-wrote with Herman Wasserman. The article is freely available
here.
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29 November, 2022: A comparative study on online political engagement and misinformation that I worked on with Saif Ahmed and Melissa Tully is now published in
Online Information Review.
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30 November, 2022: The Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield hosted the launch of my latest co-edited volume, Disinformation in the Global South. The recording of the launch is on
YouTube
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6 October, 2022: At the University of Sheffield, I presented some preliminary findings on
my ongoing project with Africa Check to develop misinformation literacy materials for South African high schoolers. A recording of the rountable discussion is available
here.
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1 October, 2022: I had the opportunity to share some thoughts on the influence of China on Sub-Saharan African media at an event organized by Wilton Park, an agency of the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The slides of my talk are
here.
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16 September, 2022: The Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University invited me as Bonnier Visiting Professor last week. During my time at the Deparment, I delivered
a lecture on Afro-Chinese media relations, and
a seminar on global media flows.
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11 September, 2022: My latest collaboration with Herman Wasserman, a book chapter titled "The Messenger, the Message, and the Receiver: South African Government Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic" just got
published online. A working paper version of this chapter is available
here.
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22 August, 2022: I discussed with
SABC News, South Africa's national broadcaster, the findings of a recent
needs assessment of South African school's educators for the project 'Becoming a Responsible Media Consumer'.
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4 August, 2022: At the 105th Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (
AEJMC), we presented a
poster from the ongoing research project about misinformation on WhatsApp in Kenya and Senegal.
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27 July, 2022: I spoke about Chinese and Russian influence operations in Africa with Sasha Fegan at the Lowy Institute for their "Rules Based Audio" podcast. The recording is available
here.
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7 July, 2022: The
Journal of Information Technology & Politics just published my latest co-authored paper with Saif Ahmed and Melissa Tully, "Social media, misinformation, and age inequality in online political engagement". A pre-print of the
article is available
here.
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29 June, 2022: Alongside Herman Wasserman, at the University of Cape Town, we completed a needs assessment of media literacy training in South Africa. The full report is
available from the website of Africa Check, who commissioned the research report. A shorter version was published in
The Conversation.
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2 June, 2022: It was a busy ICA (International Communication Association) Conference this year. I presented work on China's public diplomacy
(video), representation of women in international broadcasting
(poster) and countering COVID-19 misinformation on WhatsApp
(video).
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20 May, 2022: My research on China's StarTimes' investment in the African pay TV sector
was featured in a
The Economist Special Report on China-Africa. I also spoke to
GRID about China's communication of the war in Ukraine to African media.
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24 March, 2022: I spoke to students at the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore about conducting Text Analysis with R. The slides of my workshop are available
here. I also offered a short workshop on how to use quanteda. The materials are
here.
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20 March, 2022: Very excited to be joining the
editorial board of
African Journalism Studies, the leading academic publication in the study journalism and the news media in Africa.
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24 February, 2022: Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) invited me to speak to the Central Bank of Nigeria about how social media text data can be used to gather insights on consumers of financial institutions. The slides from my talk are
here, and a recording of the session can be accessed on
YouTube.
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10 January, 2022: Late last year, I joined a fact-checking workshop organized by Casa África and the Kenya Media Council in Nairobi. I was asked about my views on the current state of fact-checking in Kenya and the relevance of Kenya-Spain cooperation in this area. My thoughts on this are on
this YouTube playlist (in Spanish), with comments from other Kenyan and Spanish experts and practitioners.
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9 December, 2021: I spoke to Radio Euskadi about the outcomes of the 8th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation that took place in Dakar earlier this month. A recording of my contribution is availble (in Spanish)
here. My views were also featured in
this article by China Digital Times.
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5 December, 2021: I presented my work with Herman Wasserman on the reception of disinformation about China and COVID-19 in Kenya and South Africa at the 2021 International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO) Regional
Workshop. The slides I used for the presentation are available
here.
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2 December, 2021: Casa África invited me to share some of the findings of my ongoing work on disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa with a group of Kenyan journalists at the 3rd Spain-Africa Journalists Meeting in Nairobi, which this year focused on fact-checking. The slides I used for my talk can be downloaded from
here.
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30 November, 2021: I presented, virtually, my work on the historical continuities of Africa-China media relations at the annual conference of
APAD (Association for the anthropology of social change and development) that took place in Lomé, Togo. My
presentation updates some of the findings based on work with archival material from the US National Archives.
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19 October, 2021: I was invited to present my research on the influence of Chinese global media in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa at the
"China's 'Soft' Cooperation with Africa" virtual conference jointly organized by the University of Notre Dame and Shanghai International Studies University. The slides from my talk are available
here.
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3 October, 2021: Disinformation in the Global South, the book I co-edited with Herman Wasserman for Wiley, can now be
pre-ordered online. It features thirteen chapters, with cases representing multiple areas in the Global South. It also includes a chapter by me where I reflect on some of the methodological challenges of researching disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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24 September, 2021: Digital Journalism just published online the latest outcome from the research project "A Cross-national Study on Misinformation Sharing Practices in Sub-Saharan Africa" that I lead. The paper, titled "Who is Responsible for Stopping the Spread of Misinformation? Examining Audience Perceptions of Responsibilities and Responses in Six Sub-Saharan African Countries", can be downloaded from
here.
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28 July, 2021: Last year, I received funding from
Villanova University and the University of Houston for a project that looks for strategies to counter misinformation on WhatsApp in Kenya and Senegal. In this project, that is co-led with Melissa Tully at the University of Iowa, we have conducted 100 in-depth interviews, and fielded a two-week experiment on WhatsApp. More details about the project are available
here and
here.
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15 July, 2021: In early 2020, I took a group of students to Kenya to film a documentary about the changes brough about by digital media in Kenya. This week, we
"premiered" the film, which was co-produced by my colleague Sahar Hamzah, at the
2021 IAMCR conference in Nairobi. A slightly longer cut (40 minutes) of the film can be found
here.
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14 July, 2021: Earlier this month, we published a summary of the findings of our project "Trust in Institutions, COVID-19 Related Information Seeking and Vaccination Messaging in South Africa" in
an article in
The Conversation. The story has now been
translated to Afrikaans by Netweerk24, and my co-author, Herman Wasserman, discussed our findings
in an interview with South Africa's leading private news network, eNCA.
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16 June, 2021: For the past few weeks, I've been working with Herman Wasserman, at the University of Cape Town, on a working paper that looks at the relationship between trust in institutional messangers, COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and messaging strategies. A summary of our findings can be found
here.
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May 27 2021: The 2021 International Communication Association Annual Conference starts today. I have three presentations at the conference this year. I recorded videos for two of them and published them on my YouTube channel. Both of them look at China's narrative on COVID-19 in Africa,
one on televion and
and another one in print.
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May 25 2021: A short piece based on my recent paper in
International Journal of Communication on users' motivations for sharing disinformation was published in
The Conversation.
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20 May 2021: At the University of Cape Town Summer School, I presented the findings from my study with Herman Wasserman on what motivates people to share misinformation about China and COVID-19.
Here are the slides from my presentation,
there's a recording of the whole session featuring other papers about the media and COVID-19.
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13 May 2021: I was invited to introduce the African Digital News (adn) corpus to faculty and students at Rhodes University in South Africa. The slides from my presentation, titled "Old Questions, Big Data: Using the African Digital News (adn) Corpus to Study News Flows", are available
here.
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13 May 2021: My study on the influence of Chinese media --particularly Xinhua-- on the news content of African media during the COVID-19 pandemic just came out in
Global Media and China. The full text (Open Access) is available from the
publisher's website. The replication code and data for this study is on
GitHub.
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26 April 2021: Kioko Ireri and I co-edited a
Special Issue of the
Journal of African and Media Studies featuring six papers on the disruptions and transformations of digital media in Africa. A pre-print version of the Introduction we co-wrote is available
here.
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19 April 2021: I was invited to present some details about the "adn: African digital news"
project at the DH@UH: Building Connections event at the University of Houston. The slides from my presentation are available
here.
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14 April 2021: The
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology recently published the paper "Why are Politically Active People Avoided in Countries with Collectivistic Culture? A Cross-Cultural Experiment" of which I am a co-author. The full paper can be accessed (behind a paywall) from the
publisher's website. A news article about the findings was published in the
Asahi Shimbun newspaper (in Japanese).
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6 April 2021: Publication of a working paper on social media users' motivations for sharing disinformation around COVID-19 and China. The latest version of the manuscript, forthcoming in an edited volume, is available
here. I also published with Herman Wasserman a shorter piece in
The Conversation about the main findings.
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12 March 2021: Release of V3.0 of the "Corpus of African Digital News" that I have been working on for the last year. It includes content from 200,000 news articles published by 600 African digital media platforms in December 2020. The data
can be downloaded for free. There's more information about this project
here.
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5 March 2021: I'll be presenting with Herman Wasserman some preliminary findings of our ongoing study on misinformation about COVID-19 and China at the
Centre of the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. The slides for this talk are
here.
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16 February 2021: I shared my experience using web scrpaing techniques to study African digital news content at the "New Tools for ‘Distanced’ Anthropological Research: Webscraping and Ethnography of Digital Cultures in/of Africa" webinar at Yale University. My slides are
here.
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10 February 2021: The
International Journal of Communication published a Special Issue on comparative approaches to study misinformation that includes the
six-country study I led with data from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Read more about the project
here.
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10 November 2018: Earlier this month, I attended the second edition of ICA's Africa regional conference in Accra, Ghana. The slides for the two papers I presented there are now available in the
Research section of the website.
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18 October 2018: My research with Herman Wasserman about Chinese media in Kenya and South Africa is featured in this week's edition of
The Economist in an article titled "Soft power and censorship". The
online version is accessible through a (porous) paywall.
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16 October 2018: I co-wrote an
opinion piece, with Herman Wasserman, on the limits of Chinese interference in the African media landscape for the Asia Dialogue blog, curated by the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute.
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1 October 2018: I sat down with student reporters at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication to chat about my new position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. Read the
interview if you want to know... how I get inspired every morning.
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3 September 2018: The
newsmap R package, a semi-supervised model for geographical document classification, to which I contributed is now available on CRAN.
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XX July 2018: Invited lecture at the University of Barcelona.
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15 May 2018: The
International Journal of Communication published my latest collaboration with Herman Wasserman on the impact of Chinese media on future media professionals in Kenya and South Africa. The article is available open access from the journal's
website.
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14 May 2018: Afrika Heute, a German website dedicated to Africa-related news has published a German translation of my Africa is a Country piece. Follow
this link for the German version.
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28 April 2018: I wrote a short piece on the expansion of StarTimes across Africa for
Africa is a Country. The original piece can be found
here and I published an extended version
on my blog.
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10 March 2018: A new article written with Lauren Gorfinkel on the documentary series
Faces of Africa has been published in the
Journal of African and Asian Studies. A pre-print version is available
here.
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26 February 2018: The Conversation published an op-ed I wrote on the controversy over the offensive skit about Africa-China relations that CCTV included in this year's Spring Gala Festival. The article is
here.
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15 December 2017: We presented the book
Comunicación y poder en Asia orientla in Barcelona and Madrid. Check the media coverage or listen to the presentation (in Catalan)
here.
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29 July 2017: A new open access journal article based on my fieldwork at CGTN Africa, in Spanish, has been published in
Communication Papers.
Download a copy here.
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29 May 2017: The slides from my two ICA 2017 presentations are now online.
Download them here.
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19 May 2017: Earlier this year I was awarded the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Innovation Award for Research Degree students. I was invited to give a talk about my experience.
Watch the talk here.
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6 May 2017: New blog post on Chinese media's struggle with finding an audience in Africa.
Read it here.
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1 May 2017: My new edited book
Comunicación y poder en Asia oriental published by Editorial UOC is (finally) out.
Get a copy from here.
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10 March 2017: Course materials for my class "Crisis Communication and Management" at City University of Hong Kong uploaded.
Browse them here.
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25 January 2017: New blog entry (in Spanish) on recent changes in North Korean media system.
Read it here.
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31 December 2016: New blog post on the rebranding of CCTV into CGTN.
Read it here.
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20 November 2016: Uploaded materials for the course "Video Production" that I taught at City University of Hong kong.
See them here.