The Shadow of Fake News
Jonathan Albright
At the Intersection of News, Technology and Democracy
by John Adeniran '19
Jonathan Albright, a leading researcher on journalism, will give the lecture, “The Shadow of Fake News,” on Thursday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. in Dickinson’s Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium.
Albright will discuss the emergence of “fake news” into the realm of mass media and its current and impending effects on the domains of news, the tech sector and democracy. He calls for data-backed journalism, better data collection methods, the exposure of facts to the people before the possibility of narrative distortion and a minimization of “black box” technologies, which filter, rank and recommend certain content, regulating what information we can access.
Albright is research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His research centers on propaganda and misinformation, trending topics, visual storytelling, data-driven methodologies in journalism and news events moderated by social media platforms. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Fortune and many others. Albright is co-author of Pew Internet’s report, The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online, which explores the fate of ideological discourse and privacy concerns in the digital realm. Albright has worked for companies including Google and Yahoo and led international forums at the London School of Economics, the Oxford Internet Institute and many more.
The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the writing program and Student Senate. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Fall 2017 semester theme, Big Data.
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Published November 6, 2017