Disinformation
Joana Gonçalves de Sá: “Mitigate the misinformation pandemic by ‘vaccinating’ the susceptible individuals first.”
Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Invited Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behavior using the online spread of ’fake news’ as a model system. Disinformation and misinformation are not a new problem, so why did ...
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 ...
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 ...
Covid-19: What are the consequences of the unprecedented rush for knowledge?
The surge in COVID-19 research papers has put the spotlight on the peer review process and is changing the way we assess the quality of scientific literature.
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 ...
What drives public trust? Broadening the traditional scope of science communication with TRESCA
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of our daily lives and, by now, we are all a bit more dependent on technology than we had been before. But how can we trust all the scientific information that we receive through the media? How can we have a common understanding of what is reliable when we are being exposed to massive online information flows? Do we trust the same truths? What kind of people are more susceptible to trusting conspiracy theories? Using a novel approach based on social science, the new EU-funded project TRESCA tackles these, and other, research questions.
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 ...
Zarine Kharazian from Digital Forensic Research Lab about the research on Covid-19 disinformation
Zarine Kharazian is Assistant Editor with the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a start-up within the Atlantic Council that focuses on researching and combating disinformation and protecting democratic institutions and norms from those who would seek to undermine them in the digital engagement space. At the DFRLab, she has covered disinformation trends in the United States ...
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 ...