Alice Marwick presents the major findings from her recently published report, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Her talk describes how disinformation campaigns occur following major news events and explains how the far right manipulates stories and narratives to create and disseminate alternative frameworks over the internet.
Messaging, Marwick explains, is often reinforced by repetition; this repetition frequently occurs online within social media platforms such as Twitter. Populist movements rooted in white nationalist ideologies use repetition as a tool to amplify their message across digital platforms and media outlets. Marwick walks the audience through how media manipulation actually works, and provides a broad overview of the strategies and tactics used by the far right.
Data & Society’s Fellows Talks is a three-part Databite series showcasing our 2016-2017 fellows cohort. Each talk features 3 fellows speaking about their work, wide-ranging interdisciplinary connections, and a few of the provocative questions that have emerged this year.
Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd moderates the conversation.
Alice Marwick (PhD, New York University) is a 2016-2017 Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she leads the Media Manipulation project. Her current book project examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene which examines how people seek social status through attention and visibility online. Marwick was previously Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies and the Director of the McGannon Center for Communication Research at Fordham University. She has written for popular publications such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Guardian in addition to academic publications. In 2017, she will join the Communication department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
About Databites
Data & Society’s “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.