Disinformation Fellowship

Something I now get to say: I’m at Harvard University on a disinformation fellowship.

I became an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society as part of the Assembly:Disinformation Fellowship.

We’re examining--and I’ll just use their description here--disinformation in the digital public sphere from a cybersecurity perspective, exploring the challenges and prospective upside of potential public and private sector responses to disinformation and related problems of foreign interference.

Obviously, a topic that’s pretty relevant in 2020.

Disinformation has been with us a long time. Scribes would write down horrible rumors about neighboring rulers in ancient times, the printing press was used to spread propaganda almost as soon as it was created (And though that linked Wikipedia article is sadly short on details about exaggerations and misinformation in Reformation-era religious literature, it has a great 16th century woodcut of peasants farting at the Pope), …