Battling Misinformation, Protecting Truth

The truth matters, it always will, and Boston University added new voices last year that will make this powerfully clear.

The College of Communication welcomed media scholar Maria Elizabeth Grabe as its inaugural Dalton Family Professor and second-ever director of Emerging Media Studies. She joins Joan Donovan, one of the foremost experts in online misinformation and disinformation, who was hired by the College of Communication as an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies.

Grabe built her journalism career in South Africa where she regularly bucked up against government censorship. “I cannot think of a more acute threat to the democratic way of life than doubt about the integrity of information that flows through media platforms,” says Grabe, who is an International Communication Association Fellow as well as a former editor of the journal Communication Theory.

Donovan’s research and teaching explore media manipulation, effects of disinformation campaigns, and adversarial media movements, with a particular focus on how political parties, governments, corporations, social movements, and other networked groups engage in efforts to shape media narratives and disrupt social institutions. She has testified before Congress about manipulation and deception online and is a coauthor of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.

“It can feel a little like trying to hold back a tidal wave with your own two hands,” says Donovan, who is on the faculty of BU’s Communication Research Center. But that hasn’t stopped her yet. She places herself at the crossroads of a dark web of online vitriol, exploring cynical—and sometimes violent—posts by extremists and conspiracy theorists, often picking up on nascent movements and bad actors before they gain mainstream attention.

One of her priority initiatives at BU is to build out an internet observatory of everything nationally elected politicians post online.

“Journalists are more and more becoming the front lines of the information war,” Donovan says. “And my hope is to help them design and develop new digital methods for investigative journalism.”