1st Workshop on Misinformation Detection
in the Era of LLMs (MisD)
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In conjunction with ICWSM-2025, June 23rd, 2025, Copenhagen, Denmark
Johan Farkas is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research explores the intersection of digital media, journalism, disinformation, and democracy. Farkas is the author of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (written with Jannick Schou), which presents a critical examination of discourses around fake news and the post-truth era.
Keynote Title: The Democratic Deficit of Misinformation Solutions
Abstract: Contemporary solutions to misinformation and disinformation—from automated fact-checking to content moderation, algorithmic nudging to policy interventions—are often framed by scholars, journalists, and politicians as efforts to protect democracy. Yet these interventions often rest on a narrow vision of what democracy is and ought to be. In this keynote, Johan Farkas interrogates the underlying normative assumptions of misinformation responses across journalism, academia, and politics. Farkas argues that proposed and implemented solutions tend to reproduce a one-sided, ahistorical understanding; one that equates democracy with rationality and expert authority while sidelining key democratic values such as egalitarianism, participation, and popular sovereignty.
Farkas shows how prevailing approaches to mis- and disinformation often implicitly legitimise an increasingly authoritarian model of governance, in which public participation and popular rule are rendered secondary to decision-making by politico-economic elites. This contributes to already-existing democratic deficits across liberal democracies as well as ongoing processes of hollowing out of democratic participation.
The lecture builds on the book Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehoods (co-authored with Jannick Schou, published by Routledge in a second edition in 2023). More information
Dustin Wright is a Danish Data Science Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His research is driven by a central mission: to make the world’s knowledge reliable and accessible. This mission spans real-world knowledge, scientific knowledge, and diverse forms of human knowledge. He draws on methods from machine learning and natural language processing to achieve this goal. His work on reliability focuses on ensuring the factuality and faithfulness of various types of knowledge, as well as promoting the safety and interpretability of machine learning systems. On the accessibility side, he aims to develop machine learning models that process knowledge efficiently and sustainably.
Keynote Title: The many faces of science misinformation
Abstract: Science allows us to discover new knowledge about out world. Sharing this knowledge with the public, for example through science communication, is critical to build an informed society and establish trust in the institution of science. Scientific misinformation has the opposite effect, from degrading the public trust in science to endangering people’s health. In this talk, I will present my work which aims to use natural language processing (NLP) to understand and combat it. I will discuss scientific misinformation in its multiple forms, including categorical falsehoods, exaggerations, and sensationalism, and the different methods needed to detect them. Finally, I will discuss the potential for NLP to help us better understand and improve the science communication process through modeling the public perception of science news.
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