Citizen Resilience Against Online Disinformation Through Research Information Design

Jaigris Hodson received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada grant to develop an informational design approach to understand the problem of online misinformation.

In Canada and around the world, social media have created an environment of unparalleled information flows. Once viewed as a boon for democratic participation, participatory technologies have allowed anyone with a computer or smartphone and internet connection the opportunity to reach a potentially vast and global audience. However, the democratization of the means of communication, has also presented some serious challenges, one of the most important being the spread of online misinformation. The spread of misinformation has impacted political processes around the world, and may be implicated in both Trump's 2016 election and also the Brexit vote. It is also a problem inhibiting the spread of science, health and research related information, meaning it may also be implicated as such diverse and divisive issues as the anti-vaccination movement, the flat earth movement, and the denial of climate change.

The spread of online misinformation cannot be mitigated unless scholars, professional communicators, designers, and engineers first understand why it spreads. Combatting the spread of online misinformation is no easy feat. The reasons information spreads on social media platforms are varied and complex and often do not follow a logical economic or cause-and-effect model. To truly understand why information and misinformation travel online, one must consider multiple interacting, sometimes conflicting, and often context specific or relational influences that cause people to engage with specific types of information online and then pass them on to others. For this reason, this proposed workshop seeks to bring together subject matter experts with academic research and professional experience in different forms of information and how they endure over time, in order to develop an informational design approach to understanding the problem of misinformation.

It is only through understanding how different factors influence the spread of information in different contexts that we can build recommendations for how to understand and most effectively design accurate information to ensure it spreads on online platforms. This workshop will culminate in a series of knowledge mobilization projects aimed at sharing these factors, and how they influence information design best practices with others. Outputs from this workshop will include a whitepaper (or equivalent), online best practices guide, data sharing MOUs connecting several Canadian Universities working on this topic, a curriculum plan addressing online misinformation, and finally, the draft for a partnership grant on how online misinformation can be effectively mitigated.