|
You are invited to an upcoming ISAC webinar which will tackle one of the most urgent challenges in global health: the growing impact of disinformation in infectious diseases.
Jon Roozenbeek, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Influence and Technology Lab, will explore how modern communication technologies shape (mis)belief formation, polarisation, and manipulation in today’s information landscape.
Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, will introduce the VDA Framework, showing how verification, deliberation and accountability can diagnose the health of democratic systems.
Together, they will unpack how misinformation spreads, how democracies drift between meaningful and simulated forms of public discourse, and what these insights mean for safeguarding truth and rebuilding trust in infectious disease communication.
|
Programme
-
Verification, democracy and accountability in a changing information environment
Eliot Higgins (Bellingcat, Netherlands)
-
The underground manipulation market and its effects on health misinformation
Jon Roozenbeek (Influence and Technology Lab (ITLab), UK)
Moderators
Heiman Wertheim (ISAC President-Elect) / Souha Kanj (ISAC President)
Speaker bios
Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat, will speak on the VDA Framework, his analytical model for diagnosing democratic health through the conditions of verification, deliberation, and accountability. Drawing on cases ranging from open-source investigation to the contemporary information environment, he will set out how democracies move between substantial, performative, and simulated forms of these functions, and what the framework implies for protecting and rebuilding democratic life.
Jon Roozenbeek is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Influence and Technology Lab (ITLab), which sits between Cambridge's Department of Psychology and the Department of Communication Science at the Free University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on (mis)belief formation, intergroup conflict (particularly in Russia and Ukraine), polarisation, underground manipulation markets, and the use and misuse of modern communication technologies. Jon has (co-)authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and two books with Cambridge University Press: The Psychology of Misinformation (with Sander van der Linden) and Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian-Ukrainian War.
|
