Combatting the Spread of Online Misinformation
Date: Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Time: 11:00 AM – Sign-In
11:30 AM – Lunch
12:00 PM – Presentation
The discussion will describe several different methods to understand and describe human behavior on the Internet, and the effect of offline events on online communities. The central focus of this work is a broad investigation into how groups of people behave online. Research will be presented that seeks to better understand the effect of policies enacted by governments or other social media companies on online behavior. Included will be an alternative to censorship as a way to stop the spread of misinformation and propaganda online as well as preliminary results on this intervention. GitHub was used to research how new information is adopted into a group, and the resulting struggle that emerges from fights over how to apply this new knowledge. The results suggest that censorship has an impact on the structure of groups and that deplatforming results in more frequent users to leave Reddit, for example. Additionally, results in piloting a social media literacy site suggests that people can be taught to do their own fact checking when they come across misinformation on social media, that will result in less misinformation in the news feeds of citizens and a more informed public, hopefully.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 22 Feb 2022
- Time: 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM
- All times are (GMT-05:00) US/Eastern
-
Add Event to Calendar
- 200 East Brandeis Avenue
- Louisville, Kentucky
- United States 40208
- Building: University Club of Louisville
- Click here for Map
- Contact Event Hosts
- Co-sponsored by Computer Society Chapter of the Louisville Section
- Starts 31 January 2022 12:00 AM
- Ends 22 February 2022 11:00 AM
- All times are (GMT-05:00) US/Eastern
- Admission fee ?
Speakers
Dr. Pamela Thomas
Combatting the Spread of Online Misinformation
Research will be presented that seeks to better understand the effect of policies enacted by governments or other social media companies on online behavior. Included will be an alternative to censorship as a way to stop the spread of misinformation and propaganda online, as well as preliminary results on this intervention. GitHub was used to research how new information is adopted into a group, and the resulting struggle that emerges from fights over how to apply this new knowledge. The results suggest that censorship has an impact on the structure of groups, and that deplatforming results in users leaving Reddit more frequently, for example. Additionally, results in piloting a social media literacy site suggest that people can be taught to do their own fact checking when they come across misinformation on social media. This will hopefully result in less misinformation in the news feeds of citizens, and a more informed public.
Biography:
Dr. Pamela Thomas is an assistant professor at the Speed School of Engineering at the University of Louisville. Her research focuses on computational social science, data science, and machine learning for the common good. She has expertise in a variety of different areas including social media research, misinformation spread, media literacy programming, healthcare analytics, data mining, neural networks, and graphs.
Email:
Address:JB Speed School of Engineering, 222 Eastern Parkway, Louisville, Kentucky, United States, 40208
Media
| IEEE_Technical_Meeting__02-22-22__R1 | 144.61 KiB |