Josh Introne: Collective Narrative Dynamics: Towards a new understanding of disinformation

Tue, Apr 30, 2019   3:30 PM ‐ 4:30 PM

Tuesday, April 30, 3:30-4:30 PM, Room 182 ComArtSci

Disinformation (misinformation that is deliberately spread) is a growing concern in today’s media-ecosystem.  Many researchers have focused on disinformation as a contagion, seeking to detect its sources, stymie its spread, or inoculate the populations it might infect.  However, security experts have long recognized that the danger is not disinformation itself, but rather its potential to enflame divisive, destabilizing, and anti-democratic narratives.  Unlike contagions, narratives are distributed and evolve within loosely connected groups of people over long periods of time.  This dynamic process, and how disinformation might alter it, is poorly understood.  In this talk, I will describe my research program to examine how narratives are developed and adapted by crowds, covering recent results and planned studies. I will conclude with some thoughts about why such studies are urgently needed if we are to address the problem of disinformation in the near term.

Joshua Introne

Joshua Introne is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Information Department at Michigan State University. Professor Introne received his PhD in Computer Science from Brandeis University in 2008. He completed his post-doctoral work at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, where he was the Chief Architect of the Climate Colab, a platform designed to crowd-source solutions to climate change. Professor Introne is a sociotechnical researcher who focuses on improving the collective intelligence of digitally mediated populations in order to contribute to the social good. His work cuts across the fields of information studies, communications research, and HCI, and he has worked in the areas of online health communities, decision support, and social computation.