Heat Waves become Australia’s song of 2020?
For starters, it’s just a really catchy pop song. The psych-pop group dialled in some elements of hip-hop production on
Dreamland and it’s a fun listen.
The song went viral in the Minecraft YouTuber community (which is at least a hundred-million people deep) and it‘s been all over TikTok in the recent – and kind of ridiculous – trend of sea shanties, which has only helped grow
Heat Waves’ popularity.
Heat Waves and the
Dreamland album it appears on, are actually extremely personal works for Glass Animals – made after a hugely traumatic event.
How COVID-19 polarized Australian politics: #IStandWithDan versus #DictatorDan phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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How COVID-19 polarised politics: #IStandWithDan versus #DictatorDan
A QUT study of two interrelated Twitter hashtag campaigns in relation to the Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ handling of the COVID-19 second wave found the activity was driven by a “small, hyper-partisan core of highly active participants” and not bot accounts.
More than half of the top 50 Twitter accounts tweeting the anti-Dan hashtags qualified as anonymous “sockpuppet” accounts compared to one third of the #IStandWithDan accounts.
A sockpuppet account is defined as human-managed with fabricated or anonymous profile details, often created to support or critique a specific person or organisation, posing as an independent third-party unaffiliated with the main account operator.
Australia experienced two major emergency events in 2020 – the summer bushfires followed shortly after by the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout these events, social media played a critical role in providing information, facilitating social connection and public discussions.
However, there was also a deluge of mis- and disinformation, often spread through coordinated networks. A worrying and persistent element emerged within such networks – extremist messaging by inauthentic accounts that exploited emergency events to magnify their content and recruit followers.
In early January, I tracked a set of 300 fringe, hyper-partisan Twitter accounts that were pushing the #ArsonEmergency hashtag. I was initially alerted to their activity due to automated bot and troll detection tools, which showed a significantly higher proportion of suspicious activity compared to other hashtags. This hashtag, which parodied the popular hashtag #ClimateEmergency, was the centrepiece of a discredited ca