RightsCon Toronto 2018

Although widespread propaganda and disinformation is not a new phenomenon, its occurrence within today’s online networked environments has wrought new challenges for democracy for countries across the globe. A mix of legitimate political entities and malicious actors have exploited and leveraged vulnerabilities in platform architectures to surreptitiously insert false news narratives into unwitting media environments. Worse, these campaigns are often coordinated to take advantage of platform algorithms and muddy the difference between genuine and false.

The urgency of this problem has spurred many efforts to study and address the phenomenon. Despite the important efforts to coordinate the growing set of projects and initiatives in the field, plentiful opportunities remain to foster greater collaboration within the research community and between researchers, journalists, and media watchdogs. In this workshop, we will seek to identify and put into place better mechanisms to coordinate research efforts and to link together researchers with practitioners. We plan to identify new opportunities for collaboration and to enhance current efforts at coordination, and ultimately foster peer support networks and mechanisms.