Can the Fight against Disinformation Really Scale?

The past few years have seen a surge of interest and funding in fighting disinformation. Rumors and conspiracy theories have disrupted democratic process from Brazil to India, to the halls of Congress in the United States; they have hobbled the success of the fight against COVID. Many proposed solutions hinge either on "fact-checking" or on using AI to identify and defuse disinformation on a large scale.

We can try to scale the fight against disinformation with machine learning. But what is it that we are trying to scale? Are we certain that hearts and minds can meaningfully be changed at scale? What would that effort look like?

This talk will challenge a key assumption currently made in fighting disinformation: that "trustworthiness" is a property of information, not of the people who spread it, and that trust is a human quality that can be generated at scale. Dr. Andrews will lay out findings from science and technology studies, neurocognitive development, and "new literacies" research to point to best practices and new approaches to the disinformation problem.