How to Fight an Infodemic

Open to Debate

Education, Society & Culture, News, Government, Politics

4.5 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the globe, the World Health Organization is warning of the spread of something else – an information epidemic or “infodemic.” And while diligent consumers of the news are inundated with stats, graphs, press conferences, and think-pieces, so too are they exposed to dubious data, miscredited quotations, and outright harmful claims. In this episode, John Donvan sits down with two leading experts in the spread of information, journalist and editor-in-chief of PolitiFact Angie Drobnic Holan and computer scientist and associate professor of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington Kate Starbird, for a discussion on how to be discerning communicators during a time of crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, I'm John Don Ben, host and moderator of Intentative Square US Debates.
0:11.2	And we are talking now in the time of coronavirus.
0:17.0	So that's obviously the topic that's going to be on the table in this conversation.
0:21.5	And I want to point out that this is not a debate as we usually presented.
0:25.8	But it's more of a conversation, our discourse disruptors series.
0:30.0	And that's where we talk with people who are very concerned with and studying the state
0:35.9	of our discourse around various topics and issues.
0:39.7	How good are we at talking about the things that we know to talk about?
0:43.9	And obviously we're living through it now, the coronavirus pandemic, and it's sweeping
0:49.1	the globe and is prompting all kinds of conversations.
0:53.1	Some of it difficult, a lot of it faulty, which has, I'm sure you're guessing, is the reason
0:58.3	we're having this conversation.
1:00.0	The World Health Organization is warning about what it's calling an information epidemic.
1:06.9	Some people are calling it an infodemic.
1:09.6	So in this episode of Intelligent Square US, we will be discussing this whole issue, this
1:14.7	idea with two people who are experts in the study of information.
1:19.1	Angie Drobnik-Holan, who is the editor-in-chief of Politifact, and Kate Starberg, a computer
1:25.2	scientist and associate professor at the University of Washington.
1:29.7	All three of us are speaking to you from home through the miracle of technology.
1:35.5	We are able to connect this way.
1:37.4	I want to remind you that you can listen to all of our discourse disruptors series by visiting
1:41.5	us online at IQ2US.org.
	...

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