Dr William Dance

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 ☀️

Cheers Chris!

Thanks!

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.

Thank you, and nice to see you today too!

Thank you!!

This has been the best day. 🤩

Thank you!

I had the pleasure and privilege to be external examiner for williamdance.bsky.social PhD on Disinformation discourses seen through corpora. Thanks William for an engaging read and a brilliant discussion today. And congratulations Dr Dance! drclaireh.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social

Thanks!

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.

Also, a shoutout to @sofiaruediger.bsky.social and @coocho.bsky.social for not only being fantastic editors, but for consistently picking the best covers for their books 🐙

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...

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.

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.

This new image can show different angles, perspectives, and contexts, and results in a complete reimagining of a real subject into an artificial composition.

I’ve chosen ‘enhancement’ because more often than not this is done simply to garner impressions/likes, and is aimed at ‘improving’ an image.

I’m going to refer to this as disenhancement and misenhancement: the modification of a real-world artefact by adding fabricated or false elements to create a new version.

What distinguishes this from classic image distortion is that it results in an entirely new image, rather than a modified one.

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.

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.

Corpus Linguistics and Social Media Social media services are used by billions worldwide to share user-generated content. This content offers a vast array of insights to linguists intere…

New from me: ‘Corpus Linguistics and Social Media,’ to be published in print and online for the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition in 2026.

For now, you can find it online here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Front page of the journal article '‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: A new type of vaccine-specific scepticism on Twitter/X during the COVID-19 pandemic', published in Vaccine X

Another 'Questioning Vaccination Discourses' paper is out!

"‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: A new type of vaccine-specific scepticism on Twitter/X during the COVID-19 pandemic" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

By @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social et al

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...

‘I am still unsure…’ – Spontaneous expressions of vaccine indecision on Mumsnet Vaccination programmes in 90% of countries in the world have been affected by ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Childhood vaccinations are particularly important. …

New open access paper by Questioning Vaccination Discourse (Quo VaDis) project team (www.lancaster.ac.uk/vaccination-...) on expressions of #vaccine #indecision on a parenting forum.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Front page of the journal article referenced in the post

I suppose one way to start here is to share a new publication. Here it goes:

'‘I am still unsure’ - Spontaneous expressions of vaccine indecision on Mumsnet'

with @vaclavbrezina.bsky.social @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social @drclaireh.bsky.social et al.
#healthcomm #vaccinations

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...

This is a perfect example of why we need to legislate to protect social media users from harmful content, because social media companies can just decide one day to do what they want, and no one can stop them.

We don’t need vibes-based moderation, we need real protections for adults and children.

More Speech and Fewer Mistakes | Meta We're ending our third party fact checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.

This is the most extraordinary statement I’ve ever seen from a social media executive.

There’s too much to unpack immediately, but the takeaway here is that Zuckerberg is doing what he *feels* is right, with no oversight, no real transparency, and with global impact.

about.fb.com/news/2025/01...

FakeBelieve - The Disinformation Research Blog Disinformation Research Blog by William Dance

My blog FakeBelieve had its best ever year in 2024 with 3,151 visitors from 72 countries spanning 5 continents! 🌍

The top countries were the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and the Philippines. I published 5 new posts with some new resources for adults and kids too.

Check it all out at: fakebelieve.blog

I don’t think disagreeing with a platform’s governance precludes it from being a data source. Dorsey didn’t run Twitter well imo, and we still used it.

However, the representativity of Twitter data has definitely shifted bc of Musk’s pretty drastic changes, i.e. the internet's "town square" is dead

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

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

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/

Hi! I wrote something a few years back which was 4 easy steps to reading and processing (dis)information online, aimed at kids. So it sounds like that could be useful? I’ll send you a message now.