Tag: misinformation

Convincing people to get COVID vaccine is vital — here’s how to do it

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Dec. 12, Austin Baldwin, psychology professor at SMU Dallas, and Jasmin Tiro,  associate professor of Population and Data Sciences at UT Southwestern, for a piece mapping out public health strategies to overcome “vaccine hesitancy” among the public. Published at Fox News online under the heading Convincing people to get COVID vaccine is vital — here’s how to do it: https://fxn.ws/2Kgmn5h

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The decision by the Food and Drug Administration Friday night to issue an emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is a critical breakthrough in the battle against the disease that has infected more than 15.7 million Americans and killed nearly 300,000.

The FDA ruling that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and effective is just a first step in a massive rollout of the vaccine. Now the enormous task of distributing the vaccine around the nation begins.

But a crucial obstacle to widespread vaccinations will be public hesitancy to take the vaccine, driven by doubts, fears, and misinformation spreading throughout the nation and the world.

Continue reading “Convincing people to get COVID vaccine is vital — here’s how to do it”

Time to vote and rehearse our disinformation drills

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Feb. 27, Jared Schroeder, assistant professor of journalism at SMU Dallas specializing in Free Speech/First Amendment topics, for a piece warning Texas voters to beware of disinformation on social media channels. Published in the Dallas Morning News: http://bit.ly/32x3zn7

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Our social media feeds will have more lies in them than normal this week.

While many Texans cast ballots in early voting, be assured the pipeline of misinformation and disinformation is saturating the channels ahead of Super Tuesday and the massive state and national primaries. Foreign and domestic bad actors live to tamper with our election process.

These floods of false and misleading information on election days have become as much a part of casting a ballot as getting an “I voted” sticker. We should expect and prepare for them. . .

Continue reading “Time to vote and rehearse our disinformation drills”

We all need to be deepfake detectors — but especially social media platforms

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Jan. 30, Jared Schroeder, assistant professor of journalism at SMU Dallas specializing in Free Speech/First Amendment topics, for a piece advocating that social media platforms and their users redouble efforts to thwart and halt deepfake videos. Published in The Hill: http://bit.ly/2RDtd60 

A quality deepfake video clip, released at the right time, could almost certainly swing an election result.

The technology needed to create these deceptive video clips — which convey people saying or doing things they never said or did — has peaked just as primary voters and caucus-goers register the first results of the 2020 presidential election in the coming days and weeks.

It’s obvious something should be done to safeguard our election process from such powerful disinformation, especially during a time when our social media communities are awash in intentionally false and misleading political information. . .

Continue reading “We all need to be deepfake detectors — but especially social media platforms”