Banning extremists from social media platforms can reduce hate speech, but the deplatforming process has to be handled with care – and it can have unintended consequences.
Alex Newhouse, Middlebury Institute of International Studies
Millions of supporters of Donald Trump flocked to the far-right social media platform, where hate speech and calls for violence thrive. The US Capitol insurrection could be the platform's undoing.
Calling out false information on social media may do more harm than good.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with reporters after participating in a video teleconference call with members of the military on Nov. 26, 2020, at the White House in Washington. He reiterated his baseless claims during the news conference that the Nov. 3 election was ‘rigged.’
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
If citizens disbelieve the institutions that count ballots and the organizations that accurately report on those results, it will be impossible to agree on what a legitimate election looks like.
Parler is similar to Twitter but doesn’t control or discourage hate speech or calls to violence.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Image
Alex Newhouse, Middlebury Institute of International Studies
Millions of supporters of Donald Trump have flocked to the far-right social media platform Parler, where hate speech thrives.
Mail-in and absentee ballots, like these being processed by election workers in Pennsylvania, are a subject of misinformation spreading across social media.
AP Photo/Matt Slocum
Election misinformation typically involves false narratives of fraud that include out-of-context or otherwise misleading images and faulty statistics as purported evidence.
T.J. Thomson, Queensland University of Technology; Daniel Angus, Queensland University of Technology, and Paula Dootson, Queensland University of Technology
In an age of democracy via social media, platforms are struggling to combat visual mis/disinformation such as 'spliced' images and deepfakes. Digital media literacy has never been so important.
As Election Day approaches, Americans would do well to remember they are targets of disinformation campaigns. Here's what they could look like, and what's being done about them.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Southeast Asian governments not only have to deal with the virus but also with the false information surrounding it.
Fake videos generated with sophisticated AI tools are a looming threat. Researchers are racing to build tools that can detect them, tools that are crucial for journalists to counter disinformation.
From 2017 to 2019, Twitter users in the United States saw many tweets related to vaccination but only rarely encountered anti-vaccine content and almost never saw content from bots.
African leaders blunt the transformative power of smartphones through censorship and internet shutdowns.
EFE-EPA/John Hrusha
It's easy to edit video of public figures to make them appear asleep, confused, drunk or cognitively impaired when they are not. The technique is being used to undermine Joe Biden's campaign.
Advance NZ leader Billy Te Kahika speaks at a Wellington protest in August 2020.
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