Deepfakes are expected to come broadly online in 2020, ushering in an era of confusion or worse – the complete collapse of trust in what we see and hear. What do news operation need to know? And how...
Joan Donovan
Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. She is co-author with Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg of Meme Wars : The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Joan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC). TaSC explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.
Her research and teaching interests are focused on media manipulation, effects of disinformation campaigns, and adversarial media movements. She teaches a graduate-level course on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Campaigns with a focus on how social movements, political parties, governments, corporations, and other networked groups engage in active efforts to shape media narratives and disrupt social institutions.
Prior to joining Harvard Kennedy School, Joan was the Research Lead for Data & Society’s Media Manipulation Initiative, where she led a large team of researchers studying efforts to manipulate socio-technical systems for political gain. She continues to hold an affiliate appointment with Data & Society. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Science Studies from the University of California San Diego, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, where she studied white supremacists’ use of DNA ancestry tests, social movements, and technology.
In this workshop, journalists will learn how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation and disinformation campaigns using the methods of investigative ethnography. Participants will analyze a...
In this session we will discuss current research in the field, the role that journalists play in the amplification of misinformation, the evolution of tactics of media manipulators, and what open ques...
The ethical and social impact of technology, and the role of journalists and media in it. The session will consider what the social impacts and ethical implications are of new technologies such as ar...
Is quality information like quality nutrition? Can we map the building blocks of useful information online without further censorship? Is building a nutrition label for credible content a feasible con...
Countries across the world are dealing with an unprecedented influx of immigrants and refugees, with a record 258 million people moving to new countries in 2017. In most of these countries, citizens a...
