The effort to destroy facts and make American ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism, according to Lee McIntyre. In “On Disinformation” he shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. McIntyre explains how autocrats use propaganda to manipulate the populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread and offers ten smart steps to fight back and win the war against truth.
Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. His most recent book is ON DISINFORMATION: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. He is also author of Dark Ages, Post-Truth, The Scientific Attitude and How to Talk to a Science Denier, all published by MIT Press.
Joining the conversation is Joan Donovan, assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, disinformation and media manipulation. She is founder of The Critical Internet Studies Institute, a non-profit that advocates for a public interest internet and co-author of MEME WARS: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America with Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg.
Donovan’s research explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. She 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.
Donovan was the former Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy, where she directed the Technology and Social Change Research Project. Her team researched media manipulation, disinformation, and adversarial media movements and published open access textbook, the Media Manipulation Casebook. Her public scholarship has been showcased in a wide array of media mainstream outlets, including MIT Technology Review, NPR, Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic.
Recorded 10/17/2023