Events

Please save the date of May 5 on your calendar for an in-person symposium featuring research presentations, strategizing about future proposals, policy impact opportunities in D.C. and the EU, and networking.

Disinformation is often assumed to work by deceiving audiences, but influence can occur even when misleading content is recognized as such. This talk examines how Russian strategic narratives circulating on social media resonate with audiences in West Africa. Drawing on mixed-methods research in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, the talk explores whether and how exposure shifts perceptions of foreign powers. The findings highlight how disinformation operates through resonance with existing grievances rather than belief, underscoring the importance of context-sensitive approaches.

Reporting on misinformation research can be dizzying. While some researchers see the issue at the heart of conflicts, climate disaster, and the decline of democracies, others contend that there is no real problem and some politicians see a “censorship-industrial complex” at work. Help from the very platforms where misinformation spreads is needed for some studies and they pay for others. Results are hard to generalize and when strong effects are found they are often less than what the public already believes to be true. And at the end of the day, whatever the journalist writes is subject to all the same strange distortions of the information ecosystem the scientists are studying – and might be labeled misinformation itself.

In 2024, Kai Kupferschmidt wrote a story in Science covering the state of misinformation research and what he saw as the biggest problems the field is facing. In this talk, he looks at the biggest problems in covering misinformation research and his biggest failures - at least as far as his cognitive biases allow.

Humans have always engaged in information competition throughout history. In so doing, they adopt new technologies, try to control the flow of information, and compete to win hearts and minds by flooding the information ecosystem with their point of view, sometimes slipping into open conflict. But what if these competitions for reality follow a pattern? What can looking beyond the competition to the information ecosystem in which it occurs tell us about mitigating escalating conflict? This talk looks beyond the latest technology or disinformation to examine the wider system and how studying it might unlock solutions to problems within it.

The Institute for Information, the Internet and Democracy hosted a summet on the use of AI technologies in research and scholarship. This event included a keynote talk by Chris Bail and lightning talks on novel uses for artificial intelligence in social science research. Recordings from both the keynote and lightning talks can be found here.

A two-day workshop bringing together European researchers, regulators, and funders to advance Digital Services Act Article 40 research and strengthen EU research capacity on technology's democratic impacts. IIID aims to foster cross-border research partnerships, strengthen researcher-regulator dialogue, and increase funder awareness of EU research infrastructure needs.