08/04/2021
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/social-media-symposium-social-media-and-race-based-disinformation-registration-164884990445
From COVID-19 to the ballot box: Social media and race-based disinformation in 2020 and beyond
The NAACP has said disinformation—falsehoods and rumors, purposefully meant to cause harm—is “a perpetual attempt to tarnish and erode our democracy.”
The theme of this year’s Social Media Symposium focuses on dissecting how disinformation campaigns used real-world instances of systemic racism to discourage Black participation in COVID vaccination protocols, voting and debates about reexamining police power following the murder of George Floyd. Social media recommendation algorithms control what we see and when, based on previous engagement habits, pushing some of us into filter bubbles designed to convince us the earth is flat (yes, that is a real Facebook community endorsed by NBA player Kyrie Irving). The problem is when these communities convince social media users elections have been stolen and lead to Jim Crow-era mob violence like we saw at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Journalists at the MIT Tech Review discovered the spread of dis- and misinformation that are part of the Facebook business model. However, opportunities for foreign-based Internet trolls to control the national discourse have not been stopped at Facebook and have found their way into mainstream news and information outlets.
The interdisciplinary conference seeks to discuss this and more. The presentations during the two-day virtual conference will examine these challenges and new possibilities as social media matures into the mainstream, and it will create opportunities for scholars, practitioners and observers to make more informed assessments about the information appearing on their social media timelines, and often in the news media, and how it impacts their analogue lives.
