Misinformation and Society

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Broadly, this course will cover the concept of true and false information, why it matters, what effects it has, and different approaches to mitigating it.The course will start with an introduction to the concept of misinformation. What does it mean for something to be true, and therefore what does it mean for something to be false? What different types of misinformation exist, and what are their characteristics? Why do we care if people are informed or misinformed – and what assumptions are we making about what it means to be informed.The next section of the course will focus on different reasons why people 1) believe, 2) create and 3) share misinformation, as well as how they do so. Incorporated into this section will be a brief history of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and how their dissemination has changed over time. It will also include descriptive information about how much misinformation is circulating in different places, how it spreads, and who is most susceptible to its effects.The third and final section of the course will focus on efforts to combat misinformation. This includes preventive programs like media literacy interventions designed to make people more skeptical of misinformation, and better able to detect it. It also includes strategies by dissemination platforms (ie search engines, social media platforms, traditional media) to identify and reduce the visibility and spread of misinformation. And it includes efforts at misinformation correction – giving people good information to hopefully outweigh the bad. This includes expert correction, journalistic fact checking, and peer-to-peer correction.