The Battle Against Disinformation

After her keynote address at ICON 2020 on Oct, 28, Nina Jankowicz moderated a panel discussion on disinformation:

“In the future, we will have to more directly engage the consumers in this fight, to be smarter, to understand they have some obligation to do a little work, and to empower them to not suffer under this deluge of disinformation. So, through media literacy, we’re asking folks to take a breath, understand what they’re up against and don’t necessarily believe everything they hear or see on their phone.”
— Neil Brown, president, Poynter Institute

“From a psychological point of view, once you’re exposed to a falsehood or a myth, it’s very difficult to then correct it, because even when people receive a correction or a fact-check [people] continue to retrieve incorrect information from their memories. Sometimes you can partly correct a falsehood, but it’s difficult. The idea of pre-bunking is that we preemptively give people the tools they need to spot manipulation techniques in media and to be immune to fake news.” — Dr. Sander van der Linden, director, Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge

“I try to humanize the impact of disinformation. This is the best way of reaching audiences and helping them to understand the danger that [it] poses. There’s such an appetite from people to hear about disinformation. They want to understand it. They want to know how it affects their lives and why it’s important.” — Marianna Spring, disinformation and social media reporter, BBC