Brandi Collins-Dexter on COVID-19 Misinformation and Black Communities
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2020
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Brandi Collins-Dexter, the senior campaign director at the advocacy organization Color of Change and a visiting fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She recently published a report with the Shorenstein Center on “Canaries in the Coal Mine: COVID-19 Misinformation and Black Communities,” tracing how different false narratives about the pandemic surfaced among Black social media users in the United States. So what makes this misinformation unique and especially dangerous? And how should the responses of technology companies account for the ways the Black community is particularly vulnerable to this kind of misinformation? They also discussed Color of Change’s role in the #StopHateForProfit campaign, an ad boycott of Facebook in protest of the company’s handling of potentially harmful speech on its platform.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | We're still all trained to say, well it's in the media, if it's in the New York times |
| 0:37.5 | or it's in the local news, it holds some level of weight or true to it. |
| 0:41.8 | But then there's also this pulling back of, well they're not going to know everything |
| 0:47.2 | around black people. |
| 0:48.2 | And certainly if we look at the early days and some of the early deaths in the United |
| 0:52.0 | States, they were black people. |
| 0:54.2 | They weren't being reported on by race, if at all. |
| 0:58.1 | And so an absence of a story that makes sense to black communities, you start looking |
| 1:03.5 | to other places to fill in the blanks and that's what takes you into certain online |
| 1:08.2 | spaces. |
| 1:09.2 | I'm Quinted Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast July 9th, 2020. |
| 1:16.4 | It's another episode of our Arbitus of Truth series on disinformation. |
| 1:21.4 | Evelyn Duac and I spoke with Brandy Collins Dexter, the senior campaign director at the |
| 1:25.9 | advocacy organization, Collar of Change, and a visiting fellow at the Shornstein Center |
| 1:30.7 | on media, politics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. |
| 1:35.9 | She recently published a report with the Shornstein Center on Canaries in the Colmine, |
| 1:40.5 | COVID-19 misinformation in black communities, tracing how different false narratives about |
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