Media & Misinformation

11:45 am - 1:15 pm

JOAN DONOVAN

Media manipulation and online extremism

Dr. Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns.

Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC). TaSC explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC 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.

Dr. Donovan received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Science Studies from the University of California San Diego, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, where she studied white supremacists’ use of DNA ancestry tests, social movements, and technology.

YouTube: Big Tech: On How Platforms Enabled the Capitol Hill Riot (Jan 21, 2021)

YouTube: The Breakdown: Joan Donovan on domestic misinformation (Dec 2020)

DEEN FREELON

Empirical study of digital political communication

Deen Freelon is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP).

His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science.

Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data. Computer programming lies at the heart of his research practice, which generates novel tools (and sometimes methods) to answer questions existing approaches cannot address.

Freelon earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2012 and formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.

YouTube: DIGZOOM series - Hashtag Heroes vs. Disinfo Dystopia (April 2021)

YouTube: PBS News Hour The threat of disinformation (Sept 2020)

Publications

CAMILLE FRANCOIS

Disinformation campaigns and digital rights

Camille Francois studies how organized actors leverage digital technologies to harm society and individuals, from cyberwarfare to online harassment.

She currently serves as the Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika—the leading cybersecurity company focused on information integrity—and oversees its analysis, investigation and R&D teams.

Camille has advised governments and parliamentary committees on both sides of the Atlantic on cybersecurity and digital rights, investigated Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election on behalf of the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and served as a special advisor to the Chief Technology Officer of France. In 2019, Camille was recognized by the MIT Tech Review in its annual "35 Innovators Under 35" award, and named one of TIME Magazine's "100 Next" global leaders for her work on information operations.

Camille is a Mozilla fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and an affiliate of Harvard University's Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society, where she conducts research on cyber peace and the impacts of cyber conflict on civil society. She holds a masters degree in Human Rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a masters degree in International Security from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

YouTube: Fake everything: machine learning against disinformation (Sept 2020)

YouTube: Washington Post interview - “Agents of Chaos” (Sept 2020)

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