This article introduces a new form of collaborative web-based editing which has become increasingly popular in recent years. It involves web users as reporters and co-producers for specialist news sites by allowing them to submit their own news reports and pointers to relevant articles elsewhere on the web, and sometimes even hands over editorial control to the online community altogether. Websites of this type move on from traditional journalistic gatekeeping approaches, where editors publish only what they regard as ‘fit to print’, to what is here termed gatewatching, where almost all incoming material is publicised, but with varying degrees of emphasis. Gatewatching sites frequently become major repositories of specialist information, turning into resource centre sites for their interest community, and are particularly common on the fringes of the open source software development movement. Some of these sites can be seen to directly apply open source ideals (direct involvement of the community, open access to all aspects of the development process) to the reporting of news, in effect making news itself an open source.

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Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dissemination of the rumour on Facebook from its obscure origins in pre-existing conspiracist groups through greater uptake in more diverse communities to substantial amplification by celebrities, sports stars and media outlets. The in-depth tracing of COVID-related mis- and disinformation across social networks offers important new insights into the dynamics of online information dissemination and points to opportunities to slow and stop the spread of false information, or at least to combat it more directly with accurate counterinformation.

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During the course of several natural disasters in recent years, Twitter has been found to play an important role as an additional medium for many-to-many crisis communication. Emergency services are successfully using Twitter to inform the public about current developments, and are increasingly also attempting to source first-hand situational information from Twitter feeds (such as relevant hashtags). The further study of the uses of Twitter during natural disasters relies on the development of flexible and reliable research infrastructure for tracking and analysing Twitter feeds at scale and in close to real time, however. This article outlines two approaches to the development of such infrastructure: one which builds on the readily available open source platform yourTwapperkeeper to provide a low-cost, simple, and basic solution; and one which establishes a more powerful and flexible framework by drawing on highly scaleable, state-of-the-art technology.

Amongst the most prominent uses of Twitter is its role in the discussion of widely televised events: Twitter's own statistics for 2011, for example, list major entertainment spectacles (the MTV Music Awards and the BET Awards) and sports matches (the UEFA Champions League final and the FIFA Women's World Cup final) amongst the events generating the most tweets per second during the year. During such major media events, Twitter is used most predominantly as a technology of fandom: it serves as a backchannel to television and other streaming audiovisual media, enabling users offer their own running commentary on the universally shared media text of the event as it unfolds live. This article examines the use of Twitter as a technology for the expression of shared fandom in the context of a major, internationally televised annual media event: the Eurovision Song Contest. Our analysis draws on comprehensive data sets for the 'official' event hashtags, #eurovision, #esc, and #sbseurovision. Using innovative methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of Twitter data sets containing several hundreds of thousands, overall patterns of participation to discover how audiences express their fandom throughout the event are examined. Such analysis is able to provide a unique insight into the use of Twitter as a technology for fandom and for what in cultural studies research is called 'audiencing': the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event. The work points to Twitter as an important new medium facilitating the connection and communion of fans.