Social Media Comprehension and Mass Communication: Curriculum Development to Combat Misinformation
Abstract
This effort comprises two primary objectives. Objective One (Years 1 and 2) will involve conducting an extensive and multi-dimensional set of analyses on the linguistic and rhetorical markers used by adversaries in effective propaganda. Mississippi State University will partner with Arizona State University (henceforth: The team) to collect a large corpus of blogs and other news content that have been used to spread propaganda on the Internet. The team will then conductdynamic, computational linguistic analyses of these blogs to determine the features that characterize the most effective propaganda. Finally, we will propose a design for computational models that will be able to detect and characterize the spread of fake news and propaganda across popular social media sites.Objective Two (Years 2 and 3) of this project will focus on the use of behavioral studies to examine the cognitive underpinnings of social media comprehension, critical evaluation, and communication. To do so, the team will rely on a combination of the computational models developed in Objective 1 along with behavioral experiments. We will examine various contextual factors in order to understand the temporal evolution, cognitive dynamics, and effects of textualfeatures on the comprehension and critical evaluation of multiple documents such as those found within social media outlets. Below we provide an overview of relevant background research and then describe our technical approach to achieving Objectives 1 and 2. The long-term objective of this project is to develop and test interventions to improve social media comprehension, critical evaluation, and communication. Our ultimate objective is to use social media to defeat tactics with counter-tactics by providing different perspectives, illustratingcontext, pointing out bias and distortion, reaffirming facts and context, creating compelling content, creating crowd-calming messages, distributing positive stories, and reaffirming positive values.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 15, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912424
Entities
People
- Laura K. Allen
Organizations
- Mississippi State University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy