Global Infodemic

Transatlantic Communities and Disinformation

Disinformation campaigns are nothing new; foreign and domestic actors have used such campaigns to influence voter behavior and recruit followers to political extremes. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, similar tactics were used to push false information about the virus, its origins, and national and international health policies. Since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has also waged a disinformation war at home and abroad. This AGI webinar will examine various threats that disinformation poses to the United States and Germany. What limits the government’s regulation of information? What tools are available in our liberal democratic societies to counteract the spread of disinformation?

with
Tobias Hopp, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
Matthias C. Kettemann, Professor of Innovation, Theory and Philosophy of Law and Head of the Department for Theory and Future of Law, University of Innsbruck

This webinar will convene via Zoom. Contact Ms. Elizabeth Hotary at ehotary@aicgs.org with any questions.

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Tobias Hopp is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on issues related to mis- and disinformation, online political expression, and political knowledge. His scholarly work has appeared in outlets such as Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Human Communication Research, and New Media & Society. He is also the co-founder of a startup organization that uses artificial intelligence to identify quality news content at scale. He received his PhD from the University of Oregon in 2014.

Matthias C. Kettemann is Professor of Innovation, Theory and Philosophy of Law and head of the Department for Theory and Future of Law at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is head of the Research Program on private communication orders at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute, Hamburg, and leads research groups on international law and the internet and on platform governance at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, and the Sustainable Computing Lab at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

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This event is part of the AGI project “The Importance of the Transatlantic Partnership in Times of Global Crises” and is generously funded by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany, funded by the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK).