"Fighting Disinformation to Save Democracy" | Claudia Flores-Saviaga
Channel: Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute
Date: 2022-03-04

This talk was presented to the Communication Institute and the Department of Communication at the University of Utah on 2 March 2022.

The Internet has become a plague on democracy. Worldwide, we have seen the surge of disinformation, hate speech, and hackers. Online violence and disinformation have had a chilling effect on citizen participation, undermining democracy in all its key elements. To counter these threats, numerous tools and platforms have emerged. However, these platforms have so far been ineffective at opposing disinformation. Claudia Flores-Saviaga, Ph.D. student at Northeastern University and member of the Influence Operations research group at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that to design effective tools we need to first understand how people produce disinformation, and how they are fighting back to overcome disinformation.

In this talk, she first presents her large-scale data analysis research on how a political troll community fabricates disinformation and engages people to participate with them. Using framing theories from collective action research, she finds that posts that integrate conspiracy theories are the most effective at driving participation with political trolls. Next, she presents a multi-platform, large-scale data analysis on how people organize to fight misinformation in the aftermath of a natural disaster. She found that citizens created micro-tasks to facilitate participation from a wide range of specialists to limit misinformation. Armed with the knowledge of her data analysis, she presents a new architecture that goes beyond fact-checking and instead focuses on crowdsourcing citizens to overcome conspiracy theories and strengthen democracy.

https://saviaga.com/
Twitter: @saviaga