Once relegated to the fringes of only the most paranoid online communities, today the QAnon conspiracy theory has followers and supporters on an international scale, going so far as to be endorsed by a number of political candidates and one elected member of Congress. The fanatical far-right theory combines allegations of child sex-trafficking by Satan-worshipping […]
2020 has been a year marked by worldwide crises and changes, including a global pandemic, efforts to increase social justice, nation-shaping elections, massive wildfires and other environmental events, to name just a few. These crises and changes—in particular, their social dimensions—have been directly impacted and shaped by disinformation, influence campaigns, and other efforts to undermine […]
CEREN BUDAK, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SCHOOL OF INFORMATION The spread of political misinformation threatens the health of our democracies and weakens the legitimacy and public trust in the established political and media institutions. In this talk I will examine the spread of this threat, focusing primarily on the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections […]
You might think that something like a search engine allows for equal access to information. Yet looking deeper into how we discover things, there’s a culture of racism and sexism impacting what we find. Based on over 6 years of academic research, Safiya Umoja Noble’s book looks into the internet’s biases and how it acts […]
Join us for a virtual discussion exploring how to talk to friends and family about politics, misinformation, and what can be those “tough conversations” around differences of opinion that emerge during elections. The discussion will bring together experts in human psychology, technology, and media to consider how media coverage framed issues for voters this election […]
This year, with the stakes higher than ever, the candidates squared off in one vice presidential and two presidential debates. The events generated fireworks and controversy, but also memorable exchanges and substantive discussion. Still, some argue these debates are built on a format whose time has passed. The Commission on Presidential Debates defends these showdowns […]
Event featured image, but exclude link Event content Please join us for “What do the data tell us about election 2020?” a panel that will feature: Erika Franklin Fowler (Wesleyan University), Jill Lepore (Harvard University), Solomon Messing (ACRONYM), and Kate Starbird (University of Washington). Each panelist will speak about their research into topics such as […]
The Hamilton Lugar School’s sixth conference on America’s Role in the World® will pay tribute to Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, one of the school’s namesakes and an exemplar of placing principle over politics for more than 50 years. The virtual, nonpartisan event — unique to higher education — takes place Tuesday, December 1 and Wednesday, December […]
The internet is now the most common source of political news for almost half of Americans, and social media is now the primary source of news for those under 30. Yet today’s youth have little capacity to evaluate the credibility of digital sources, with colleges across the country often relying on severely outdated guidelines supporting […]
The Internet is an interconnected network of roughly 70.000 networks, but there are hardly and binding rules that prescribe _how it works_. Every network can set its own rules. Distribution and fragmentation are foundation concepts for the Internet. In this talk we will explore the governance of this distributed information network and the process of […]