Earlier this year, Meta sent shockwaves throughout the digital community with their announcement that they would be dropping their fact checking program in favor of a “Community Notes” model. In this new structure, the onus is placed on the platform users themselves - and not the platform - to call out false information when they see it and add context to misleading posts. Meta’s decision is largely expected to increase the amount of harms such as hate speech and disinformation online, and is but one in a long series of changes to the information ecosystem that is upending the way users engage with content online, causing many to ask the question: how do we build resiliency in the face of such change?
This talk will explore potential answers to that question, unpacking findings from a new study from the Berghof Foundation on peacebuilding responses to disinformation that highlights the ways peacebuilders in particular have responded to the challenge of online harms over the past decade and how these approaches may be improved moving forward. Based on these findings, it further explores the requests we may make of technologists and policymakers in order to continue shaping a safer online environment for all.
Speaker Bio
Grace Connors is a research assistant in the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland, where she researches the intersection of philanthropy, nonprofits, and social impact. In addition to this research, she is passionate about the field of digital peacebuilding, particularly in examining how technology both drives conflict and may be used to resolve it. She has explored this passion through her continued research on the potential of AI to respond to hate speech on social platforms in the PeaceTech and Polarization Lab at the University of Notre Dame, as well as her prior roles in strategic communications as a 2024 Scoville Peace Fellow, monitoring and evaluation, and software engineering. Grace holds a BA in Computer Science and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame and is pursuing a Master's of Data Science at the University of Maryland.