Liz Schwartz

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

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

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

Muslim candidates face online hatred, disinformation Read More »

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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The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The views expressed in the Shorenstein Center Fellows Research Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Harvard Kennedy School or of Harvard University. Fellows Research Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this

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Social Media Becomes Battleground for Voting Integrity Misinformation

Information Disorder Update: October 30, 2018 Social media users have raised a chorus of complaints and allegations during the midterm campaign about the purging of millions of names from registration rolls to suppress voter turnout. Several state governments have responded that their critics are mischaracterizing routine and legally mandated maintenance of the rolls to keep them current

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Social Media Becomes Battleground for Voting Integrity Misinformation

Information Disorder Update: October 30, 2018 Social media users have raised a chorus of complaints and allegations during the midterm campaign about the purging of millions of names from registration rolls to suppress voter turnout. Several state governments have responded that their critics are mischaracterizing routine and legally mandated maintenance of the rolls to keep them current

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