At the Truthiness in Digital Media conference, co-hosted by the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and MIT’s Center for Civic Media, one fact was eminent — there are a lot of innovative people out there putting together technical resources to make it easier to combat Truthiness and misinformation, in media digital or otherwise. Continue reading →

I asked the following question at the Berkman Center’s recent Symposium on Truthiness in Digital Media: “Should we think of truthiness in terms of probabili-ties rather than use a True or False dichotomy?” The wording here is important. The word “truthiness” already suggests a subjective fuzziness around the term. Expressing truthiness as probabilities provides more contextual information than does a binary true or false answer. Continue reading →

As part of the Truthiness hackathon, a group of us wanted to design empirical studies to investigate how (mis)information works and how it effects people’s behavior. After some brainstorming, we decided to focus on the following three topics: Continue reading →

The Theory

Mounting evidence from a variety of fields—psychology, political science, communications–suggests that facts, alone, rarely suffice to change minds in contested areas. Rather, this research suggests that different “frames” or “narratives” can make contested facts appear more or less threatening, depending upon the context in which those facts are embedded. What seems to matter most for persuasion, then, is whether particular facts are framed in such a way as to support, or challenge, one’s personal and political values. Continue reading →

After a day of deliberating on Big Ideas — what is truth? how do we defeat its adversaries? what if they’re robots? — the academics and technologists at the Truthiness in Digital Media conference gathered Wednesday at M.I.T. to drum up real-world solutions to tractable problems. (The conference, co-hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center and the Center for Civic Media, generated a lot of interesting blog posts. I live-blogged the event here.) Continue reading →

The last two days of the Truthiness conference, co-hosted by the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and MIT’s Center for Civic Media, exposed a rich cross-section of people, research, and applications dedicated to fighting misinformation in its many forms. We spent the day Tuesday discussing the wide world of facts and falsehoods, with an embarrassing collection of brains on hand to inform us on the history, cognitive psychology, and best practices of encouraging a healthy respect for reality. The challenge ahead, now that all the mini eclairs are gone, is to convert the goodwill, knowledge, and collaboration generated by this conference into a united front against delusion. Here’s my pitch. Continue reading →