Liz Schwartz

Misinformation Speaker Series: Will Stevens

Will Stevens is Director of the Public Diplomacy Division at the Foreign Service Institute. He spoke about “Adversarial Narratives” and their use by states, non-state actors, and domestic political parties. He also discussed his work training U.S. diplomats to represent the United States in challenging times, American influence around the world, and how public diplomacy […]

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Lina Yu illustration for the NY Times publication

NYT Opinions: Kids Shouldn’t Have to Sacrifice Privacy for Education

Shorenstein Center Pozen Fellow Dipayan Ghosh, an expert in data privacy and digital platforms, and Jim Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, which advocates for improving media and entertainment for families, authored an op-ed published today in the New York Times. They argue that technology companies have been given nearly free rein

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Takis Metaxas: Online Manipulation of U.S. Elections

Takis Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, studying online social media, primarily related to the propagation of information and misinformation, prediction of political events, and in developing tools that help users evaluate the trustworthiness of information. In particular, with his Wellesley colleagues and students, he has been studying the problem of

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Digital Border Battles

It would be ludicrous if it wasn’t so malicious: Fringe websites and social media users dismissed the migrant families who got caught up in skirmishes at the U.S.-Mexican border as “paid crisis actors” taking part in a staged hoax. That phrase is a dog-whistle reference to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where

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Takis Metaxas: Online Manipulation of U.S. Elections

Takis Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, studying online social media, primarily related to the propagation of information and misinformation, prediction of political events, and in developing tools that help users evaluate the trustworthiness of information. In particular, with his Wellesley colleagues and students, he has been studying the problem of

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Dipayan Ghosh on MSNBC

Shorenstein Center Pozen Fellow Dipayan Ghosh was on MSNBC with Ali Velshi on Thanksgiving Day, talking about Facebook and tech platform regulation. Dipayan is a lead research fellow on the Shorenstein Center’s Platform Accountability Project, where he has published papers on data privacy, algorithms, and platform regulation policy. Formerly he worked on tech policy at

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Wildfires trigger conspiracy theories

Disinformation narratives emerged across multiple platforms and websites as the Camp Fire and Woolsey Fire made their respective ways across part of California this week. While the mainstream media covered how to help victims, the celebrities who had lost homes, the size of the fires and the causes of the fires, the disinformation themes that spread

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Midterm redux: a post-election scan from the Information Disorder Lab

Much of the election-related online disinformation we’ve monitored since the midterms has attacked specific candidates or election officials and promoted groundless claims of fraud in ways that may further weaken public trust in the electoral process itself. Tactics identified by the Information Disorder Lab include unfounded accusations of vote-stealing, machine tampering, finding votes, unspecified fraud

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Midterm redux: a post-election scan from the Information Disorder Lab

Much of the election-related online disinformation we’ve monitored since the midterms has attacked specific candidates or election officials and promoted groundless claims of fraud in ways that may further weaken public trust in the electoral process itself. Tactics identified by the Information Disorder Lab include unfounded accusations of vote-stealing, machine tampering, finding votes, unspecified fraud

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Midterms 2018: Trends in Information Disorder

The Information Disorder Update: November 5, 2018 Amid warnings of a looming civil war and an immigrant “invasion” from Central America, the 2018 midterm campaign has thrived on hyperbole and misinformation that have become weapons in an online battlefield. In this digital warfare, the angriest, most extreme voices have dominated the political arena. Finally, on

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Muslim candidates face online hatred, disinformation

The Information Disorder Update: November 1, 2018 With an unprecedented number of Muslim candidates running in the midterm elections, a virulent Islamophobic backlash has erupted in some districts — often laced with online mis- and disinformation. More than 90 American Muslims sought statewide or national office this year, and about 50 made it through the primaries, up

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