A Right to Truth? Information, Communication, and Democracy in the 21st Century

Date: 

Wednesday, May 4, 2022, 8:30am to 4:30pm

Location: 

Rubenstein 414 A.B., the David Ellwood Democracy Lab, Harvard Kennedy School

This interdisciplinary workshop is convened jointly by the Program on Science, Technology and Society (Sheila Jasanoff) and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (Mathias Risse) at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as the Oxford Internet Institute (Philip Howard). The theme of the workshop sits at the intersection of various concerns: the massive spread of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news – as well as the characterizations of true but inconvenient reporting as fake. Workshop speakers will also explore the loss of trust in advice given and positions taken by scientific, economic, or political elites, against the backdrop of the decline in journalism as a “fourth estate.” Additionally, speakers will delve into how shared commitments to democratic governance has become less important than the victory of one’s own side in an election campaign and other matters. Registration is now closed. If you have registered, you will receive an email notification. 

8:30 am: Registration opens, Coffee served

9:00 am: Welcoming Remarks

9:15 am: On Why the Truth Will Set Few People Free: Understanding the Role of Untruth in Human Life

  • Mathias Risse, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs, and Philosophy, Harvard Kennedy School

Those of us who make a living as thinkers and teachers readily appreciate the importance of truth and make its pursuit a central part of our own lives. But our commitments easily make us oblivious to the sheer importance that various types of untruth justifiably have in people's lives. This talk seeks to come to terms with the role of untruth in human life.

10:15 am The Future of Platform Power: Quarantining Misinformation

  • Joan Donovan, Research Director, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Rob Faris, Senior Researcher, Technology and Social Change Project, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

The field of misinformation research is mired in a nostalgia for a time when reality was reflected by a mainstream media narrative. Some suggest there is a democracy-destructing polarization of US culture, a fissure exploited by the Trumpian right and exacerbated by algorithms. But, if researchers took seriously the history of algorithmic manipulation, then networked social movements of the radical left were the pioneers of “playing the algorithms” as John Postill explained in his early research on the Spanish Indignados movement’s manipulation of social media trends. Social media, when used by fringe groups strategically, can move periphery groups to the center of public attention. For many years post-Occupy in 2011, this was a celebrated affordance of these new technologies and possibly stalled legislation as social media corporations became too big to fail. What can taking the long view about social media manipulation and the struggle for visibility/discoverability by fringe actors teach us about the current focus on media manipulation and disinformation as imbedded in the design of platforms? We propose that if the field of misinformation research begins to focus on getting more truth from social media, then librarians should be major contributors to the design process.

11:15 am: Rights in the Infrastructures of Truth-Making

  • Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School (moderator)
  • Abhigya, Austin Clyde, Gabriel Dorthe, and Jayshree Sarathy, Fellows of the STS Program

Exploring the “right to truth” from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective means questioning both what is at stake in conferring a “right” to knowledge and what constitutes a “truth,” and how we collectively arrive at a finding of the truth within any social formation. This panel delves into the complexity of both terms, showing how the determination of important public truths depends on the framing of the underlying problems and the processes by which one  addresses them. These case studies complicate efforts to construct a general “right to truth” because the very construction of reliable knowledge is tied to institutions whose credibility may itself be the subject of contestation. 

12:45 pm: Lunch setup and Break

1:00 pm: Boxed Lunch

1:30 pm: Democracy in the Public Sphere

  • Susanna Siegel, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
  • Justin Pottle, PhD candidate in Government, Center for Ethics, Harvard University 
  • Matt Macdonald, PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University

We will discuss the epistemic dimensions of democracy, with some attention to how they may constrain the roles of journalism. Our questions include: Are there rights not to be misled? What principles should help determine what counts as news? In what ways can journalism promote democracy, and in what ways can it inhabit it? What kinds of habits of minds are best for navigating the enormous range of news media?

2:45 pm: Break

3:00 pm Truth and Trust in the Global Information Environment

  • Hubert Au, Hannah Bailey, and Aliaksandr Herasimenka, Oxford University Programme on Democracy and Technology

Around the world, public perceptions of the risks of exposure to misleading information vary greatly. Expert understanding of the causes and consequences of misinformation are also varied, but there is some emerging consensus about what the most effective policy interventions are likely to be. In this session we present some of the latest findings from Oxford University's Programme on Democracy and Technology: (1) a global survey from 140 countries on perceived technology risks, (2) analysis of one of the few misinformation event data sets that includes full attribution on perpetrators, and (3) a meta-analysis of data science papers on best ways to produce public interest technology and address algorithmic bias, manipulation, and misinformation systems.

4:30 pm: Wrap up