Inside the Assembly Student Fellowship: Harvard students learn about the spread of disinformation on online platforms
By Zenzele Best
Online disinformation — and its real-world ramifications — were defining features of 2020. Over the course of the year, disinformation campaigns misled communities about the coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated racial tensions, and sought to influence the results of a national election. While disinformation prompted immediate questions about voter manipulation, public health, and social media, it also raised broader issues: what incentivizes people to deliberately spread false information? Who should be responsible for regulating online disinformation? And how do we measure the impact of disinformation or efforts to mitigate it?
The third iteration of the Assembly Student Fellowship cohort at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is spending the academic year tackling these questions. The nineteen student fellows come from ten schools across Harvard University — including the Business School, the School of Public Health, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Medical School — and study topics ranging from folklore and mythology to the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence. The cohort has a wide range of experiences with studying and mitigating disinformation: a number of students bring work experience in industry, government, or media, while others offer newer perspectives.
“In Assembly — through both the expert speakers and my talented peers — I have learned that disinformation is so much more than ‘fake news.’ There are many nuances, frameworks, and solutions which can be dissected and discussed from numerous angles.” — Arushi Saxena, Graduate School of Design ’21 and 2020–21 Student Fellow
As part of the program, the cohort participates in a year-long seminar series; the fall seminars spanned a mix of both foundational and topical issues in disinformation. Dr. Claire Wardle, co-founder and leader of First Draft News, led the program’s first seminar; she outlined the differences between mis- and disinformation, highlighted the importance of definitional rigor in the field, and discussed the socio-psychological factors that drive people to both disseminate and accept incorrect information. The session — and the lively Q&A that followed — provided a grounding place from where students could continue to explore online disinformation and helped to frame the topics the cohort would discuss later in the fellowship.
Professor Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and the Assembly program’s lead, expanded upon that groundwork during his seminar on what he sees as the “three eras’’ of digital governance: the 1990s “rights’’ era, the 2010’s “public health” era, and the current “process” era. During the seminar, the cohort explored how the anti-government-intervention ideals that characterized the 1990s Internet eventually gave way to a “public health” era of Internet governance by 2010, which was instead defined by a greater awareness of both the negative and positive impacts of new technologies. In today’s “process” era, major tech platforms are under increasing pressure from stakeholders across government, civil society, and their own industries to develop better mechanisms for accountability and regulation. In a conversation facilitated by Professor Zittrain, the cohort discussed these distinct frameworks and how their evolution has shaped society’s ability and inclination to respond to online disinformation.
“Through the Assembly Student Fellowship, I’ve been able to contextualize my algorithmic and technological thinking within the larger social, legal, and cultural factors at play in disinformation. I’ve also seen parallels in the myriads of topics where [disinformation] has perpetuated — from healthcare to elections to cultural stereotypes.” — Teresa Datta, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences ’22 and 2020–21 Student Fellow
The latter half of the semester focused primarily on specific topic areas within disinformation. In the week prior to the 2020 U.S. general election, Gowri Ramachandran and Ian Vandewalker, from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, led a seminar on the intersection of election security and digital disinformation. They discussed social media platforms’ centrality in voter suppression campaigns, effective digital resiliency plans against cyberattacks, and the steps that state and local election officials took to mitigate pandemic-related disruptions to voting. Exploring election security in the context of digital disinformation highlighted the full scope of threats posed to election infrastructure in the U.S., while also emphasizing the degree to which U.S. elections rely on public trust.
To round out the Fall Seminar Series, Jane Lytvynenko, a disinformation reporter at BuzzFeed News, spoke to the students about journalistic trends in mis- and disinformation. Citing case studies of particular disinformation that surrounded anti-police brutality protests and the U.S. elections, she discussed various online conspiracy theories, as well as the techniques and tools that journalists use to debunk these false claims. She described 2020 as the year of the “infodemic” as she analyzed the myriad of fringe campaigns that had emerged online over the course of the year and how they became part of mainstream discourse.
“As a Computer Science student, I often find myself thinking about the societal implications that come with the rapid digitalization of our world. The Assembly Student Fellowship has been an amazing opportunity to learn more about issues of disinformation from experts in the field, as well as from my peers.” — Olivia Graham, College ’22 and 2020–21 Student Fellow
In addition to the seminar series, collaborative learning is a central part of the Student Fellowship. During the fall semester, student fellows designed and ran an activity after each seminar (called an “activation”) that gave the cohort the opportunity to creatively discuss and integrate the content from the seminar. The activations — which can be read about in more detail on the Student Fellowship platform— ranged from mind-mapping to fake-headline games to haiku-writing and gave the cohort the opportunity to collaborate in small groups on how to design and facilitate virtual sessions on a range of complex topics in disinformation. “As a law student, I find I rarely get exposure to…disciplines other than law,” said Isabella Berkley, Law School ’23 and 2020–21 student fellow. “The Assembly Fellowship gives me an opportunity to discuss a single complex issue, disinformation, through a multifaceted lens made possible by a diverse cohort.”
During the spring semester, the cohort continues to learn about foundational and topical issues in disinformation: Jennifer Nilsen, a research assistant for the Technology and Social Change (TaSC) project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and Assembly Student Fellowship alum, led a discussion on media manipulation in the context of the coronavirus pandemic to start the spring seminar series. The students also learned from Naima Green-Riley, a PhD candidate at Harvard University, who led a seminar about racialized disinformation and the mechanisms through which it can be weaponized by foreign and domestic actors. Students will also hear from speakers on the history of disinformation and misinformation surrounding the coronavirus vaccine.
In place of activations, students will work together in “collaboration groups” to discuss the content from seminars and to engage in deeper work on specific issue areas in the space. In their collaboration groups, student fellows will explore disinformation frameworks, political disinformation, and the intersection of disinformation and policymaking as they continue to learn together, connect as a cohort, and better understand the spread of — and solutions to — disinformation on online platforms.
“Assembly has provided an invaluable opportunity to engage with an interdisciplinary, diverse group of students through our shared interest in [disinformation]. This [spring], I’m looking forward to building on that foundational learning in our collaboration groups and beyond. The Assembly team and speakers have been engaging facilitators and educators at every step!” — Nicholas Anway, Kennedy School ’23, Law School ’23 and 2020–21 Student Fellow
