The 2nd Cambridge Disinformation Summit, being held 23-25 April, features over a dozen research papers focusing on the effectiveness of interventions designed to understand or lessen the harms from intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading information.
The papers were selected from numerous submissions by an Interdisciplinary Scientific Committee representing many fields and expertise, including AI, psychology, political science, law, business, and communications.
Speakers from government, research and business
Organised by a team headed by Alan Jagolinzer, Professor of Financial Accounting at Cambridge Judge Business School, the Summit’s keynote speakers include Eliot Higgins, the CEO of open-source investigation outlet Bellingcat, and Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, former US national security advisor who will be hosted in discussion by Gillian Tett, Provost of King’s College, University of Cambridge, and a columnist for the Financial Times.
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge will bridge a keynote session on how group norms facilitate harmful disinformation. She will then introduce Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight project who previously led the Disinformation Governance Board for the US, Yoel Roth, Head of Trust & Safety at Match Group who led the same role at Twitter when it transferred to Elon Musk’s control, and Marianna Spring, who writes about conspiracies and disinformation for the BBC.
The Summit also hosts talks with federal legislators from several global regions who will discuss progress and issues with legislating information flows and tech companies.
Research identifies limited potential progress on disinformation
“We held the inaugural Cambridge Disinformation Summit in 2023, to help illustrate the need for further research into how we could do more to support awareness of and resilience to disinformation,” says Alan, who is also Vice-Dean for Programmes and Co-Director of the Centre for Financial Reporting and Accountability at Cambridge Judge.
“For the second Summit we wanted to hear what people have learned about what might reduce harms from disinformation, so the focus of this year’s event is Research on the Efficacy of Disinformation Interventions. The papers selected for the Summit suggest that certain interventions offer some promise. However, we plan to further assess how well the results might hold up to other assumptions or settings, whether the potential impact is scalable, why some interventions might not show results, and whether any interventions infringe on rights such as free speech.”
Disinformation insights from the Summit’s invited papers
Some of the research findings from the Summit’s invited papers suggest that:
- making people aware of manipulative messaging about politicians, such as emotional language, can reduce the subjective rating impact of accusations against them
- warning people they are being micro-targeted based on personality does not seem to eliminate the persuasive advantages of such targeting
- there is potential to produce an efficient and unbiased fact-checking system for science-related news through crowdsourcing coupled with experts’ judgment
Other Summit themes include an in-depth discussion of how crypto communities form and grow, and how some operate to exploit members with disinformation. The Summit will also explore how to manage threats to academic independence and researchers’ reputations.
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