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EVENT DETAILS |
While memes are often dismissed as having little to no political importance, they have become bedrock to the strategy of conspiracists & extremists. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America tells the story of how Stop the Steal went from online to real life. Join Dr. Joan Donovan, an expert in media manipulation, political movements, critical internet studies, & online extremism, for an overview of how memes are weaponized to push disinformation & deepen partisanship in the United States.
Sponsored by the Tech Policy Initiative, a joint program of the Goldman School of Public Policy & the CITRIS Policy Lab with support from the UC Berkeley AI Policy Hub, Berkeley Law, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, Center for Security in Politics, & the Berkeley Risk & Security Lab.
Speaker
Dr. Joan Donovan is a leading public scholar & disinformation researcher, specializing in media manipulation, political movements, critical internet studies, & online extremism. She is the Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics & Public Policy & Director of the Technology & Social Change project (TaSC). Through TaSC, Dr. Donovan explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, & disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, & facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, & civil society organizations on how to detect, document, & debunk media manipulation campaigns.
Dr. Donovan is co-author of the book Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. Her research can be found in academic peer-reviewed journals such as Social Media + Society, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Information, Communication & Society, & Social Studies of Science.
Donovan is a columnist at MIT Technology Review, a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, & PBS, & is quoted often on radio & in print. Dr. Donovan has laid out the philosophical frameworks for how to research, report on, & understand this moment in internet history & American politics. Her conceptualizations of strategic silence, meme wars, & media manipulation campaigns provide crucial frameworks for understanding how the US got to this point. She coined many of the terms that the disinformation research field & mainstream media use to understand technology's impact on society.
Dr. Donovan is also the co-creator of the beaver emoji.
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