Healthy Dose of Reality: Spotting and Stopping Health Misinfo
A quick recap of Media and January 6th, Deen Freelon speaks about health misinfo, and an award and publication from Tressie McMillan Cottom!
Media and January 6th | Quick highlights
CITAP hosted Media and January 6th on Friday April 12th. Thank you to our fantastic panelists, moderators, and attendees! We had such great questions and engagement from our audience that allowed for rich and thoughtful discussions all around.
Did January 6th feel unprecedented to you? Surprise! It was precedented. We learned about the historical precedent and context in each of our panels on Friday, concluding that the violence of January 6th is reflected in similar violence in American history.
We will have all of the panels uploaded to our YouTube channel and event page within the next week, and full panel summaries in next week’s newsletter. In the meantime, check out these 🔥🔥🔥 quotes from each panel:
Understanding January 6th
“Words matter, in part because some words evoke legal concepts… Words evoke categories, and it's important to align the categories so that people can understand what to make of this thing that they've just witnessed. And that's why I think the category of “coup” is a very appropriate one, because it's an exceptional form of extralegal political power exercise.”-Scott Althaus
Researching Threats to Democracy
“Our analysis suggests that Biden and Trump provide competing imaginaries of the vote. Biden's rhetoric for chasing images of America where the democratic process of voting sacred. In contrast, Trump's rhetoric portrays an image of America where democratic institutions have been completely corrupted, the electoral process cannot be trusted, and true Americans exert their will through anti-democratic means. So, Trump's rhetorical imaginary created a collective grievance among his supporters that ultimately found expression through violence.” -Jenny Stromer-Galley
Defending Democracy
“The First Amendment is being gamed and weaponized in ways that people have not had to deal with, because they always saw themselves as part of “the people”… There is no singular public—there never was. If you think about it, we had to go from the 1st Amendment to the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th Amendments) before anyone else got the right to participate in the freedom and rights of the 1st Amendment—that took over 100 years… If we had recognized and taught from the very beginning that this is a very limited right or freedom, I don't think we would be in this mess right now. But what we have done is allow ourselves to imagine that we're all part of the public, that everyone shares in this equally, that everyone has this protection--we don't and we never did. And until we correct that sort of assumption, we are going to continue to be gamed by thinking we all have a buy in in this we're all experiencing it the same way. The system never was that way, the foundation was broken from the very beginning. And news media doesn't address that in everything from those fundamentals of how we teach what the news media's role is, to how we actually practice it in our newsroom.” -Meredith Clark
Media, January 6th, and American History
“It's only by acknowledging that January 6th was political violence with political objectives rooted in political history can we actually start the hard work of creating an inclusive, equitable, multiracial democracy where differences are articulated in terms of adversaries and not enemies.” -Daniel Kreiss
Health misinformation: how to identify & verify
Deen Freelon, professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at UPenn and CITAP faculty researcher, and Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative at Stanford University, spoke with CNBC about the signs of health misinformation online:
It sounds too good to be true
It’s selling an alternative cure that isn’t backed by science
It makes you really emotional
It seems a little bit ridiculous
The 5 tips Freelon & Yasmin offer for verifying health info online are:
Identify the source of the information
Ask yourself if the source is really the person who should be speaking on this topic, or if they have a long track record of distributing medically dubious information
Turn to trusted news sites or health organizations to see if they’re reporting the same claims
Use reverse image search tools for photos that are included in the post if they seem fishy
For studies, look into who has funded the research
Publications and appearances
👏Tressie McMillan Cottom was announced as an American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) 2024 Woman of Distinction. “The AAUW Women of Distinction program pays tribute to women leaders who have made extraordinary accomplishments in their professions or their communities.” Congrats, Tressie!👏
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a contributor to “The Future of Research on Social Technologies: CCC Workshop Visioning Report”, published on April 10th, 2024. The report was based on conversations that took place during the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Workshop “The Future of Research on Social Technologies” on November 2nd and 3rd, 2023, in Washington, DC.
Affiliate Highlights
Enrique Armijo, a law professor at Elon University and CITAP affiliate, was featured on NPR’s “Morning Edition” to comment on the legality of doxxing. Because there are no laws against doxxing, Armijo stated “when you’re talking about things like intent and offense, it’s very difficult to come up with an objective standard. Offensiveness is almost, by definition, a subjective standard because what might offend you might not offend me.”
Coming soon
🚨Tonight!🚨 Media Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: On April 16th from 6:00-7:30pm, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is hosting their annual Wade H. Hargrove Media Law and Policy Colloquium: “Media Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The event features David McCraw, Ruth Okediji, Nadine Farid Johnson, and Lyrissa Lidsky, and will be moderated by David Ardia.