Our next guest of speaker series of Institute for Political Science is Hajo Boomgaarden (University of Vienna) with the presentation entitled:

The challenge of measuring disinformation

Fake news and misinformation are identified as major threat to democratic well-being and the integrity of political processes. While social media have been identified as providing important mechanism for the spread of misinformation, only few people seem to directly encounter misinformation in their social media use. Mass media appear a vital source for encountering misinformation. Yet to empirically assess the degree to which mass media provide misinformation (and corrections) hinges on being able to identify and classify misinformation. The lecture engages with different ways to classify misinformation and the challenges in doing so. It ends by discussing the need for open data practices to improve research endeavours in this area.