March
02

Online Invited Seminar Talk

Inoculating Against an Infodemic: COVID-19 News, Social Media, and Misinformation

Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography
Online Invited Seminar Talk, March 02, 2021

Anatoliy Gruzd from the Ryerson University in Canada discussed how he and his colleagues are forming an international effort to help stem the rise and counter COVID-19 misinformation.

Abstract

False narratives about COVID-19 have gone global and are spreading almost as fast as the virus itself. Since January 2020, there have been over 7,000 false and unproven COVID-19 related claims shared via social media and other channels. The presentation will discuss how researchers at Ryerson University’s Social Media Lab, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), are spearheading an international effort to help stem the rise and counter COVID-19 misinformation via the COVID-19 Misinformation Portal. Gruzd will also share highlights from the Lab’s recent News, Social Media, and Misinformation Survey and insights from the analysis of COVID-19 false claims that are currently making the rounds online.

About

Anatoliy Gruzd is a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies, an Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management and the Director of Research at the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University. He is also a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, a co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society, and a founding co-chair of the International Conference on Social Media and Society. As a computational social scientist, Dr. Gruzd’s research broadly explores how social media platforms are changing the ways in which people and organizations communicate, collaborate, disseminate information and misinformation, conduct business and form communities online, and how these changes impact society.  Dr. Gruzd’s expertise lies in studying online communities and social networks, and developing new computational methods and tools to study public discourse on social media sites in a wide variety of domains.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.