Disinformation Awareness Week
During the week of October 26, 2020, Dr. Joan Donovan and the BIG, If True team are hosting a series of conversations on disinformation and its harmful effects on our society. We are excited to welcome a number of terrific guest speakers from across the field. Each discussion will be live-streamed and will live here permanently as well. Please find the details for each session below.
Monday, October 26: Disinformation Awareness Week Kickoff
Erin Shields is a National Field Organizer at MediaJustice with more than 5 years of grassroots organizing and advocacy experience in the areas of technology, affordable housing, and criminal justice.
Meghna Mahadevan is the Chief Disinformation Defense Strategist at United We Dream. She is passionate about inclusive local economic development, particularly through a tech lens.
Jen Soriano is the Advisory Board Chair of Reframe as well as a writer and movement builder based in Seattle. She is a leader in the field of social justice communications, with more than 20 years of experience training new justice communicators and building the narrative power of social justice groups at the local, national and international levels.
Nora Benavidez is the director of U.S. Free Expression Programs, where she guides PEN America’s national advocacy agenda on First Amendment and free expression issues. Benavidez is a lawyer by training and, prior to joining PEN America, she worked in private practice as a civil and human rights litigator in Atlanta, Georgia.
Tuesday, October 27: What is a Disinformation Campaign?
Rob Faris is a Senior Researcher at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center. His research includes the study of digital communication mechanisms by civil society organizations and social movements, and the emergence and impact of digitally-mediated collective action, as well as the influence of networked digital technologies on democracy and governance and the evolving role of new media in political change
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society.
Jonathan CorpusOng is an Associate Professor of Global Digital Media at UMass Amherst. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Television & New Media, housed in the Department of Communication.
Jacquelyn Mason is a Senior Investigative Researcher at First Draft.
Wednesday, October 28: What is the Role of the Arts in Fighting Disinformation?
Katy Byron is the Editor & Program Manager of MediaWise at The Poynter Institute. She is a third-generation journalist with more than 15 years of experience in TV, print and digital news.
Liz Prince was born in Boston, MA, in 1981, and grew up in Santa Fe, NM. In 2002, Liz returned to Boston to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where she received a BFA. Liz draws comics full time, and lives in Portland, Maine, with her cats Wolfman & Dracula, and her husband, Kyle.
Bridget Todd is the creator and host of iHeartRadio’s critically acclaimed podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet. She got her start teaching courses on writing and social change at Howard University. Since then, she’s trained human rights activists in Australia, coordinated digital strategy for organizations like Planned Parenthood, the Women’s March, and MSNBC, and ran a training program for political operatives that the Washington Post called the Democratic Party’s “Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”
Thursday, October 29: How to Research Media Manipulation
Brian Friedberg is the Senior Researcher of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Blending academic research and Open Source Intelligence techniques, Brian is an investigative ethnographer, focusing on the impacts alternative media, anonymous communities, and unpopular cultures have on political communication and organization.
Gabby Lim is a researcher with the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, as well as a fellow with Citizen Lab. She researches information controls and security, with a focus on disinformation and media manipulation.
Emily Dreyfuss, a 2018 Nieman Fellow, is the senior editor of the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Previously, she was editorial director of Protocol and a senior writer and editor at Wired.
Brandi Collins-Dexter is currently a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. As part of her fellowship work, she researches, writes, and presents on issues that are core to Black participation in democracy and the US economy, with particular focus on the role technology and information integrity play in improving or deteriorating community health.
Friday, October 30: Media Justice: A Future’s Past
April Glaser is an investigative journalist at NBC News, covering the technology industry and labor and workplace culture in Silicon Valley. Previously, she worked at Slate, Recode, and Wired, reporting on AI, disinformation and hate online, and social media platforms.
Roberta Rael serves as Executive Director of Generation Justice. As a native New Mexican Chicana, Roberta has focused her life on building equity in New Mexico (NM). Roberta has dedicated 23 years of building the next generations of leadership for Albuquerque and NM.
Steven Renderos is the Executive Director of MediaJustice, a national racial justice hub fighting for a future in which all people of color are connected, represented, and free. As MediaJustice’s long time Campaign Director, he has led a number of high profile campaigns like the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, which lowered the cost of prison phone calls nationwide.
Meet the Host
Joan Donovan, PhD
Research Director of The Shorenstein Center
Director of The Technology and Social Change Research Project
Affiliations: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Data & Society, SSRC
Dr. Donovan’s research specializes in Critical Internet Studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the Sociology of Social Movements. Dr. Donovan’s research and expertise has been showcased in a wide array of peer-reviewed journals and media outlets including NPR, Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, ABC News, NBC News, Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic, Nature, and more.
The Technology and Social Change Research Project focuses on media manipulation, disinformation, political communication, and technology’s relationship to society. Our research explains how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. The project 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. The project is creating a research platform called the Media Manipulation Case Book, which will include 100 case studies to advance our knowledge of how misinformation travels across the web and platforms.
Read Past Issues of Meme War Weekly & Sign up for TaSC updates by clicking the icons below:
