Virtual Summer Speaker Series: Fake News & Disinformation and Its Spread The Center for Computational and Data Science (CCDS) in the iSchool at Syracuse University invites you to join us for our second speaker in the Virtual Summer Speaker Series: Fake News & Disinformation and Its Spread. Event registration is required and we will be using Zoom as our virtual platform. Please find below the details and we look forward to welcoming our remaining two thought-provoking speakers. We hope you will join us this summer! Thursday, July 9, 2020 1:00-2:00PM EST Black Trolls Matter and Other Conclusions from Analyzing State-Sponsored Disinformation This talk will discuss research Dr. Freelon conducted with colleagues on the Twitter component of the Internet Research Agency's (IRA) disinformation campaign before, during, and after the 2016 US elections. In particular, Deen will discuss the distinct appeal of Black-presenting trolls, how IRA tweets found their way into mainstream news articles, the types of audiences that consumed IRA content, and the IRA's effects on Twitter users' political opinions. Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill. These days he is mostly interested in disinformation, hyperpartisan communication, and computational methods. This research has been published in the following articles: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0894439320914853 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/243.short https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1940161219895215 https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/russian-disinformation-campaig... Sign-up: https://forms.gle/iYJRdk71X7CnFLCL6 Wednesday, August 5, 2020 9:30-10:30AM EST Influencers, Misinformation, and 'Under the Radar' Strategies Drawing on research from various interconnected projects on influencer cultures and vigilante activism in Singapore and the Asia Pacific between 2011 and 2020, this talk provides a vernacular framework for thinking about the role of social media influencers, their involvement in circuits of (mis)information ecologies, and their innovative 'under the radar' strategies of communication, amplification, and suppression. Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly influencer cultures, online visibility, and social media pop cultures especially in the Asia Pacific. She is Senior Research Fellow & ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies and at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University, and Affiliate Researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. Her books include Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (co-editor Brown, 2018), Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (co-authors Leaver & Highfield, 2019), Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media (co-editors Warfield & Cambre, 2020), and tumblr: Curation, Creativity and Community. (co-authors Tiidenberg & Hendry, forthcoming). Crystal was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia and Pacific Standard 30 Top Thinkers Under 30, and recently received the International Communication Association Popular Communication Early Career Scholar Prize and Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellowship. Reach her at wishcrys.com. Sign-up: https://forms.gle/LitdTXTPk27iYnFw6 Should you have any questions or issues please direct to Lisette Child, Project Manager for the CCDS at ldchild@syr.edu<mailto:ldchild@syr.edu>, or Jeff Hemsley, co-director of the Center for Computational and Data Sciences, at jjhemsle@syr.edu<mailto:jjhemsle@syr.edu>.