Political Pandemonium Workshop 1: What does it Mean to Protest Today? Media Manipulation and the Movement for Black Lives
The Technology and Social Change Project’s (TaSC) Political Pandemonium 2020 is a series of four digital workshops exploring the harmful effects of media manipulation on our society. These gatherings each focus on a unique subtopic of interest to both the field of Critical Internet Studies and the broader public concerns about disinformation in elections.
Watch here
About the episode
What does it Mean to Protest Today? Media Manipulation and the Movement for Black Lives, the first workshop in the series, featured a conversation with Dr. Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Shorenstein Center, Dr. Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council, and Thabisile Griffin, Doctoral Student in History at UCLA and activist in Los Angeles.
During the session, they examined the following questions: How are media manipulators using the current Black Lives Matter protests to sow disinformation and shift media attention? How does this moment provide a political opportunity for disinformers to wedge issues related to race, immigration, and the economy? How does protest misinformation coupled with health misinformation function to suppress dissent? How might the conditions of the pandemic impact civil rights, especially in the lead up to a contentious election?
Guest Speakers
Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council and Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is an acclaimed researcher and author, who explores questions of science, technology, and social inequality. Nelson’s books include, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination and The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. She is coeditor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee) and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh N. Tu). Nelson serves on the Board of Trustees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, and on the Board of Directors of the Teagle Foundation and the Data & Society Research Institute. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Thabisile Griffin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UCLA. Her research focuses on 18th century Black indigenous subversion, race-making, property, and the insecurities of the colonial state in the Caribbean. Her work examines how the tumultuous contexts of the 18th century Atlantic world created unstable markers of hierarchy — including gender, race, indigeneity, and class. She has presented her research at conferences in St. Vincent, London and North Carolina, and has been supported through numerous foundations — including the Marcus Garvey Memorial Foundation, the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, the International Institute of Fieldwork and the Penny Kanner Foundation. Thabisile has been published in the Boston Review and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies. Currently she is assisting Robin DG Kelley with his forthcoming book on the 2020 uprisings and the long history of Black social movements that have made it possible, largely led by Black queer women. In addition to history, Thabisile is a community organizer, classical violinist, and a poet.
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.
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