Eventbrite - School of Humanities and Communication, USQ presents Putting Out Fires: Internet Trolls and Toowoomba Range - Wednesday, 16 June 2021 - Find event and ticket information.
Photo via iStock.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate recently shared research suggesting that just 12 people are responsible for many of the false claims about covid vaccines that are posted on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The report, titled The Disinformation Dozen, details how these 12 people produced 65% of all anti-vaccine narratives more than 812,000 posts on various social media channels. These posters were selected based on three criteria: a large number of followers, high volume of anti-vaccine content, and rapid growth on their social media account in the last two months. Some of them had multiple accounts focused on “natural health” and sold books and other products based on this misinformation.
For a time as a teenager, Brendan Courtney thought he might want to be an actor. But then the TV presenter realised something.
“I didn’t want to play a role being somebody else. I’ve spent so long trying to be myself,” he says, sitting in the sunny apartment he shares with boyfriend Adam Maryniak, who he met seven years ago in Mother nightclub. “I knew so many closeted actors, and I always felt it placed more layers on them.”
Instead, after school he worked in accountancy, then production, before getting a job in RTE when he was 26, as a researcher.
Millennials are eating up reboots of popular shows, clothes – and food – from the ’90s
And the rest of us are joining in. Remember Dunkaroos, Pop-Tarts Crunch Cereal, Frasier? They re ba-ack! (Oops, wrong decade.)
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In the 1990s, when Jacqueline Dole was just a schoolgirl, she coveted the Cosmic Brownies she saw in her classmates’ lunchboxes. In late 2019, memories of those fudgy Little Debbie treats led Dole, now in her 30s and the owner of Biddeford-based The Parlor Ice Cream Co., to re-create them in the form of an ice cream flavor.
Dole’s version of Cosmic Brownie – milk chocolate ice cream with brownie chunks – even contains the rainbow sprinkle “meteors” (candy-coated chocolate chips) that are scattered on top of the brownie’s thick layer of frosting. “It’s just not a Cosmic Brownie without those special sprinkles,” Dole said.