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Session Recording

Confronting our Fast and Furious World of Disinformation and Misinformation Recording

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One of the hottest areas of research right now is on misinformation—because there's just so much to study. Since 2020, over 5,000 monographs have been published on this complex and interdisciplinary problem. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that conspiracy theories, lies, and disinformation are literally deadly. Why has this occurred, and what can be done to address it? Education is key, and many professions have an integral role to play.

Journalists and publishers can utilize recent research about misinformation to debunk counter it effectively, while also raising public awareness about this constant threat.

Scientists, publishers, journalists and other trustworthy sources are too often dismissed by bad actors as fake news; making it nearly impossible to establish a shared reality. This panel will cover the multi-faceted role journalists, librarians and publishers play in understanding and confronting misinformation, the logistics of errata, and how everyone can help elevate truth (as well as we know it) over lies.

One of the hottest areas of research right now is on misinformation—because there's just so much to study. Since 2020, over 5,000 monographs have been published on this complex and interdisciplinary problem. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that conspiracy theories, lies, and disinformation are literally deadly. Why has this occurred, and what can be done to address it? Education is key, and many professions have an integral role to play.

Journalists and publishers can utilize recent research about misinformation to debunk counter it effectively, while also raising public awareness about this constant threat.

Scientists, publishers, journalists and other trustworthy sources are too often dismissed by bad actors as fake news; making it nearly impossible to establish a shared reality. This panel will cover the multi-faceted role journalists, librarians and publishers play in understanding and confronting misinformation, the logistics of errata, and how everyone can help elevate truth (as well as we know it) over lies.

Laura Helmuth is the editor in chief of Scientific American, which is published by Springer Nature. She is a former editor for The Washington Post, National Geographic, Slate, Smithsonian and Science magazines. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers. She serves on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's committee on science communication and the advisory boards of 500 Women Scientists and SciLine.

Willa Tavernier (she/her) is the Research Impact & Open Scholarship Librarian at Indiana University, Bloomington. She manages open scholarship resources at IU Bloomington Libraries and provides publication data and data analysis to library administration, as well as colleges and departments, for institutional decision-making. Willa is committed to advancing inclusion and belonging in her work and research. Her research interests are equitable scholarly communication, governance and sustainability. She developed scholarly communication bibliometric dashboards to support humanities scholarship, an area underserved by conventional bibliometrics, and works with faculty and graduate students in managing their research profiles and tracking and demonstrating the impact of their scholarly work.  Willa’s recent work includes-