Presented here are educational videos recommended by Avram Turing. These videos are lectures/talks by prominent scholars and researchers. This list will be regularly updated. Each video looks at misinformation from a different point of view but complimentary with other perspectives.
danah boyd is the founder/president of Data & Society Research Institute. She is also partner researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting professor at New York University. She has been described as “the clear pioneer in the study of social media”. boyd’s paper ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship’ has been cited more than 23,000 times by other scholars.
Sinan Aral is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). His paper ‘The Spread of True and False News Online’ was rated by Altmetrics as the second most influential paper of 2018 in any scientific discipline. He has worked closely with Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and WeChat.
Claire Wardle is a leading expert on social media, user generated content, and verification. She is the co-founder and leader of First Draft, the world’s foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address misinformation. Her 2017 report for the Council of Europe Information Disorder: Towards an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making contains the most cited definition of information disorder.
Cass Sunstein is one of only 24 “University Professors” at Harvard University. He is a best-selling author and the most cited legal scholar in America. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.
Safiya Noble is an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is also a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She is the author of a best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism . She’s a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.
Stephen Wolfram provided expert testimony for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet. He is a pioneer in the science and technology of computation. Creator of Wolfram|Alpha which provides computational knowledge for Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Wolfram received his PhD from Caltech at age 20 and a year later, in 1981, became the youngest ever MacArthur Fellow awardee.
Michael Rich is the President and CEO of the Rand Corporation, a premier research organization and think tank. RAND develops solutions to public policy challenges. Thirty-two Nobel Prize winners have worked at the Rand Corporation as staff or consultants at one time in their careers. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet.
Sander van der Linden is professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he is also the Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory. He is the author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. In 2017 he was designated a “rising star” by the Association of Psychological Science.
- Disinfo Discussions: The Fundamentals with danah boyd. Courtesy of The Aspen Institute
“Aspen Digital’s Executive Director Vivian Schiller discusses the fundamentals of disinformation with Dr danah boyd, a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder and president of Data & Society, and a Visiting Professor at New York University”
2. The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Economy and Health (and How We Must Adapt). Courtesy of The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
“In this talk MIT Professor Sinan Aral drew on two decades of his own research and business experience and goes under the hood of the biggest, most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse.”
3. How You Can Help Transform the internet into a Place of Trust. Courtesy of TED Talks.
‘How can we stop the spread of misleading, sometimes dangerous content, while maintaining an internet with freedom of expression at its core? Misinformation expert Dr Claire Wardle explores the new challenges of our polluted online environment and maps out a plan to transform the internet into a place of trust — with the of help everyday users. “Together, let’s rebuild our information commons,” she says.’
4. Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. Courtesy of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
“Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein probes the fundamental question of how we can deter lies while also protecting freedom of speech in his book Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception”
5. Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression. Courtesy of PDF Youtube
Dr Safiya Noble explains that search engines are not primarily information retrieval systems in the traditional sense and why we should care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape.
6. Technology Companies and Algorithms – U.S. Senate Hearing
A compilation of some of Dr Stephen Wolfram’s responses in the U.S. Senate Hearing “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms.” The Hearing examined how algorithmic decision-making and machine learning on internet platforms might be influencing the public.
7. Truth Decay: A Primer. Courtesy of The Rand Corporation
“What are the causes and consequences of Truth Decay? This video introduced by Michael Rich, president and CEO of the Rand Corporation, examines past eras of U.S. history to identify evidence of Truth Decay’s four trends and outlines a strategy for determining what can be done to address the challenge it presents.
8. Your brain and misinformation: Why people believe lies and conspiracy theories. Courtesy of News Literacy Project
“Our brains do marvelous things, but they also make us vulnerable to falsehoods. Why? What leads people to fall for misinformation? And why do they share it with others? A discussion with Dr. Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, UK and author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity.”