Organised disinformation about the Covid-19 crisis has degraded public understanding of the crisis and threatened the reputation of credible vaccines and health policy. 

This talk looks at the broad structures and recent history of computational propaganda - the use of algorithms, automation and human curation to distribute misleading information over social media. 

Dr Howard reviews the latest evidence about social media use during our current health crisis, and reports on the very latest themes in Russian information operations about its invasion of Ukraine. He discusses the opportunities for using social media to deepen democracy and 'build back better'.

A lecture by Philip Howard

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/covid-disinformation

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

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