Led by Dr. Joan Donovan (@BostonJoan), The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC) explores media manipulation as a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.
Staff
Joan Donovan, PhD (Principal Investigator)
Research Director, Shorenstein Center
Director, Technology and Social Change Project
Latanya Sweeney, PhD (Co-PI)
Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology
Brandi Collins-Dexter
Associate Director
Emily Dreyfuss
Senior Managing Editor
Robert Faris, PhD
Senior Researcher
Brian Friedberg
Senior Researcher
Megan O’Neil
Project Manager
Lauren Faz
Project Assistant
Kaylee Fagan
Researcher
Yulan Grant
Researcher
Gabrielle Lim
Researcher
Fellows and Contributing Researchers
Alexei Abrams, PhD
Data Scientist Fellow
Brooklyne Gipson, PhD
Contributing Researcher
April Glaser
Senior Research Fellow
Jane Lytvynenko
Contributing Researcher
Marya Mtshali, PhD
Postdoc Fellow
Jennifer Nilsen
Research Fellow
Eesha Ramanujam
Research Fellow
Martin Rooke
Contributing Researcher
Jenna Ruddock
Research Fellow
Brandy Zadrozny
Contributing Researcher
Research Assistants
Amelia Acker
Erin Gallagher
Avriel Epps-Darling
Daniel Baymiller
Jazilah Salam
Talia Berniker
TaSC Team Projects
The Media Manipulation Casebook is a digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation campaigns. This resource is intended for researchers, journalists, technologists, policymakers, educators, and civil society organizers who want to learn about detecting, documenting, describing, and debunking misinformation.
True Costs of Misinformation
What are the financial, social, and human costs of misinformation? What is the price that businesses, hospitals, civil society groups, and schools pay for false or misleading information online? How can researchers support public officials and especially the communities targeted by disinformation campaigns when costing out “fake news funds” and building capacity for digital resilience? Can we put a price tag on misinformation, and if so, how, and who is responsible for paying it?
Race, Media & Tech
The impacts of technology and mis-and disinformation in communities of color is under-researched and often misunderstood. Led by Joan Donovan and Brandi Collins-Dexter, the current research focus investigates racialized disinformation and how it mobilizes white supremacists’ violence, disrupts the advocacy of civil society organizations, and saps the public’s ability to discern truth from disinformation. A term coined by Joan Donovan and Brandi Collins-Dexter, racialized disinformation refers to media manipulation campaigns that employ the strategic use of falsified racial or ethnic identities, and focus on race as a political wedge issue.
News Leaders Summit
The Shorenstein Center News Leaders program brings together small cohorts of press leaders to tackle the problem of misinformation-at-scale and media manipulation. Over the course of a semester, the News Leaders work with one another, and with Shorenstein Center faculty and staff, including Director Nancy Gibbs, Research Director Dr. Joan Donovan, Dr. Rob Faris, and journalist Emily Dreyfuss, to develop procedures and protocols to handle this threat to the media ecosystem and the functioning of democracy.
Meme War Weekly (MWW) is a newsletter dedicated to addressing political messaging that comes from the wilds of the internet.
BIG, If True is a webinar series, hosted by Dr. Joan Donovan and presented by the Technology and Social Change Research Project. Sign up for event updates or listen to past webinars.
Political Pandemonium 2020 was a series of three digital workshops, hosted by Dr. Joan Donovan and the Technology and Social Change Project, exploring the harmful effects of media manipulation on our society.
Research Papers
Mitigating Medical Misinformation: A Whole-of-Society Approach to Countering Spam, Scams, and Hoaxes by Joan Donovan, PhD, Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, Nicole Leaver, Jennifer Nilsen, and Emily Dreyfuss
Canaries in the Coal Mine: COVID-19 Misinformation and Black Communities by Brandi Collins-Dexter
Space Invaders: The Networked Terrain of Zoom Bombing by Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan
In the News and Writings
- Joan Donovan’s Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law: Algorithms and Amplification: How Social Media Platforms’ Design Choices Shape Our Discourse and Our Minds
- How a racialized disinformation campaign ties itself to The 1619 Project Brandi Collins-Dexter and Joan Donovan, Columbia Journalism Review
- Joan Donovan – ‘Do we care as much as they do?’ Extremely Podcast
- Dr. Joan Donovan on ‘media manipulation,’ the meme wars, and how disinformation hijacks free expression CNN, Reliable Sources with Brain Stelter
- Inside QAnon CNN, Smerconish: “
- Why Congress Should Look at Twitter and Facebook MIT Technology Review
- Vaccines Stop Diseases Safely — Why All the Suspicion? Nature
- You Purged Racists from Your Website? Great, Now Get to Work Wired
- Protest Misinformation Is Riding on the Success of Pandemic Hoaxes MIT Technology Review
- Covid Hoaxes Are Using a Loophole to Stay Alive—Even after Content Is Deleted MIT Technology Review
- Three Ways To Counter Authoritarian Overreach During the Coronavirus Pandemic Nieman Reports
- The Platform Is the Problem Centre for International Governance Innovation
- Vote and Die: Covering Voter Suppression during the Coronavirus Pandemic Nieman Reports
- Here’s how social media can combat the coronavirus ‘infodemic’ MIT Technology Review
- Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine Data & Society
- Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice Data & Society
- First They Came for the Black Feminists New York Times
- How memes got weaponized: A short history MIT Technology Review
Contact us at: manipulation@hks.harvard.edu
