Organised disinformation about the Covid-19 crisis has degraded public understanding of the crisis and threatened the reputation of credible vaccines and health policy.
This talk looks at the broad structures and recent history of computational propaganda – the use of algorithms, automation and human curation to distribute misleading information over social media.
Dr Howard reviews the latest evidence about social media use during our current health crisis, and discusses the opportunities for using social media to deepen democracy and ‘build back better’.