Sophia Ignatidou is an Academy Stavros Niarchos Foundation Fellow at the International Security Department at Chatham House, London, where she’s currently researching disinformation, as well as artificial intelligence’s implications for legacy and social media. She has also been working as a freelance journalist and sub-editor for more than 15 years, writing for UK outlets such as the Guardian, CNN, The Week, and most of the broadsheets in her home country Greece. She holds an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths College and an MA/PGDip in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her current interests include media theory, political security, technology and propaganda.
Contributor: Sophia Ignatidou

Michael Butter: “Education can help against conspiracy theories”
Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of The Nature of Conspiracy Theories (Polity, 2020) and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Populism and Conspiracy Theory. This year you co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories along with Peter Knight. Can you talk about some of ...

Karen Douglas interview: What is driving people’s belief in conspiracy theories?
Interview with Prof Karen Douglas Karen Douglas is a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. She studies why people believe in conspiracy theories, and what the consequences of conspiracy theories are for individuals, groups, and societies. As a social psychology scholar, what brought you to conspiracy theories as a research subject in ...

Interview with Philipp Schmid on science denialism, misinformation & the importance of public confidence in the safety & effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccine
Dr. Philipp Schmid is a scientific researcher at the Department of Psychology at the University of Erfurt (Germany). Philipp’s research aims at analysing the psychological reasons of science denialism. He is the lead author of the WHO guideline on how to respond to vocal vaccine denier in public and a co-author of the Debunking Handbook ...

Michael Hameleers : “The most effective way to combat mis- or disinformation seems to be a combination of media literacy programmes and fact-checking”
Michael Hameleers (PhD, University of Amsterdam) is Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), Amsterdam, Netherlands. His research interests include populism, framing, (affective) polarization, and disinformation. Recently, most of his research is focused on the effects of misinformation and the effectiveness of corrective information. Michael Hameleers recently released a ...

Nahema Marchal: “People who seek junk content, because they find it entertaining or are simply curious, will always find it”
Nahema Marchal is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and a researcher for the Computational Propaganda Project. Her research examines the relationship between social media and polarization and the manipulation of digital platforms in the context of mis- and disinformation campaigns. She is also an experienced media spokesperson and regularly ...

Renée DiResta: “The effectiveness of countering Covid-19 disinformation depends on the degree of trust your government enjoys”
Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social and other media networks. Renee’s areas of research include disinformation and propaganda by state-sponsored actors, and health misinformation and conspiracy theories. Renee has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business ...

Interview with Stephan Lewandowsky, cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol
Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist with an interest in computational modelling. Recently, he has become particularly interested in how people update their memories if things they believe turn out to be false. This has led him to examine the persistence of misinformation and spread of “fake news” in society. He has become particularly interested ...