Carley featured on Yahoo on disinformation

EPP Professor Kathleen Carley was quoted in Yahoo Finance about online disinformation and misinformation.

“Disinformation predates Trump,” Kathleen Carley told Yahoo Finance. “It goes back to the beginning of humankind. So it’s not like him being out of office will get rid of disinformation entirely.”

But the internet and social media have helped make the spread of false information easier than ever before. According to a 2018 MIT study, false news on Twitter “spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than the truth.

Carley said trusted sources and authorities need to take a page from the trolls and adversaries spreading disinformation and misinformation to better combat them.

“One of the reasons some of the disinformation stories’ spread is so big is that there were communities around the disinformation source that were willing to repeat it, and act like megaphones. We need those same kinds of communities that are trusted but around credible sources of information,” Carley said.

Read the full article to hear what ways Carley and other experts say we can combat disinformation online.