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The Misinformation Speaker Series is co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the NULab at Northeastern University. This series brings together leading scholars in the field of fake news and misinformation to share cutting-edge research on this important domain. For upcoming and past events and speakers, see below.

Fall 2022

  • November 30—James N. Druckman, Northwestern University, “Anti-Democratic Attitudes and Support for Partisan Violence: Are Misperceptions to Blame?”
  • November 16—Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, “Demagoguery, Technology, and Cognition: Addressing the Threats to Democracy”
  • November 2—Michelle Amazeen, Boston University, “Content Confusion: Navigating the Media in an Era of Misinformation”
  • October 26—Heidi Larson, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, “Emotional Contagion and the Power of Belief: Why it Matters to Global Health”

    Spring 2022

    • April 20—Briony Swire-Thompson, Northeastern University, “Memory and Belief Regression After the Correction of Misinformation”
    • March 23—Claes de Vreese, University of Amsterdam, “A Citizen Perspective On Mis- And Disinformation”
    • February 23—Irene Pasquetto, University of Michigan, “Disinformation as Infrastructure: Making and maintaining the QAnon conspiracy on Italian digital media”
    • February 9—Filippo Menczer, Indiana University, “Hacking Online Virality”

    Fall 2021

    • December 6—Joan Donovan, Harvard Kennedy School (event canceled)
    • November 29—Chris Bail, Duke University, “Gender, Political Persuasion, and Social Media: A Field Experiment During the 2020 Democratic Primary”
    • November 22—Emily Thorson, Syracuse University, “Factual Corrections and Misinformation During the 2020 U.S. Election: Evidence from Panel Experiments”
    • October 18—David Rothschild, Microsoft Research, “Mainstream Media is the Problem”

    Spring 2021

    • May 5—Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford, “‘News you don’t believe’: User perspectives on f*ke news and misinformation”
    • April 22—Dannagal G. Young, University of Delaware, “Epistemic Motivations, Political Identity, and Misperceptions about COVID and the 2020 Election”
    • April 7—Jennifer Pan, Stanford University, “A Study of Confucius Institute Teachers Around the World”
    • March 4—Shanto Iyengar, Stanford University, “Misinformation as Motivated Reasoning: Experimental Evidence”

    Fall 2020

    • November 18—Jacob N. Shapiro, Princeton University, “Organizing Online Foreign Influence Efforts: Lessons from Topic Models and Content-Based Detection”
    • October 21—Natalie Jomini Stroud, The University of Texas at Austin, “Reducing Misperceptions Via Social Media”
    • October 7—Young Mie Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Follow the Ad: Uncovering Election Interference behind Data-Driven Digital Platforms”

    Spring 2020

    • February 26—Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School, “Don’t Panic. It’s Just the Collapse of Neoliberalism”
    • February 12—Andrew Guess, Princeton University
    • February 5—David G. Rand, MIT, “Understanding and Reducing the Spread of Misinformation Online”

    Fall 2019

    • December 3—David Lazer, Northeastern University, “Democracy, today: Fake news, social networks, and algorithms”
    • October 2Jaime Settle, College of William and Mary, “Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America”
    • November 5—Miriam Metzger, UC Santa Barbara, “How Bad is Fake News? Motivations for Sharing Misinformation Online”

    Spring 2019

    • April 17—Deen Freelon, University of North Carolina, “Black trolls matter: The power of sockpuppet identity in social media propaganda”
    • March 27—Leticia Bode, Georgetown University, “Wrong Again: Correction of Health Misinformation in Social Media”
    • February 13—Adam Berinsky, MIT, “Rumors, Truths, and Reality: Political Misinformation in the Modern Day”

    Fall 2018

    • December 10—Will Stevens, U.S. Department of State, “21st Century Adversarial Narratives”
    • November 28—Takis Metaxas, Wellesley College, “The infamous #Pizzagate conspiracy theory: Insight from a TwitterTrails investigation”
    • November 7—Kathleen Hall Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania, “How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President”
    • November 2—Joshua Tucker, New York University, “Trumping Hate on Twitter: Measuring the prevalence of online hate speech, with an application to the 2016 U.S. election” & “Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook”
    • October 22—Claire Wardle, Harvard University, “Moving the Conversation Beyond Trump and Facebook: Characteristics of Information Disorder in a Global Context”

    Spring 2018

    • April 23—Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College, “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign”
    • April 12—Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University, “Reinforcing the benefits of distributed networks while avoiding their vulnerabilities to propaganda”
    • April 5—Deb Roy, MIT, “Health of the Public Sphere: Measurement and Interventions”
    • March 1—Kate Starbird, University of Washington, “Online Disinformation during Crisis Events”

    Fall 2017

    • November 30—Matthew Gentzkow, Stanford “Media, Polarization, and the 2016 Election”
    • November 6—Katy Pearce, University of Washington “Socially-mediated visibility in authoritarianism”
    • November 1—Jacob Groshek, Boston University, “Helping populism win? Social media use, filter bubbles, and support for populist presidential candidates in the 2016 US election campaign”
    • October 3—Alice Marwick, UNC Chapel Hill, “Media Manipulation & Disinformation Online”