Grant / January 2020

Mapping Sites of Politics: Values at Stake in Mitigating Toxic News

Many have questioned the influence that “fake news” may have had in the 2016 US presidential election, yet many of the approaches proposed for remedying this challenge may act to censor or chill online discourse, separate online communities, destroy legitimate debate, and create centralized points of media control. This project will inform and support the design and critique of proposals and approaches to mitigating “fake news” by inserting values and a long-term view into the conversation. The project will develop metrics from a framework of democratic values implicated in proposed countermeasures, and will run scenario thinking and value-fictions workshops to explore the implications of proposals and test the values framework.