Fostering Collaboration for Global Impact

CITS connects with other academic units on campus and at other institutions, with industry, with policy-makers, and with the wider public. We accomplish this through public lectures, sponsored visitors, conferences, media outreach, and multimedia content on our website

Besides our lecture series, we annually organize a major event designed to engage faculty, students, and the larger community. In 2016, for example, we sponsored a screening of the documentary Code: Debugging the Gender Gap followed by a panel discussion with the director, a female engineer from the community, and three UCSB faculty affiliates. More than 200 people from across campus and the local community attended the event and were active participants in the lively discussion regarding the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and the reasons for this gender gap. The film raised the question: "What would society gain from having more women and minorities code?" Other public events have included a series of workshops by the founders of Loomio, an open source software tool for collective decision-making used in more than 90 countries, and a symposium on Life in the Age of Drones. This past year our outreach efforts were thematically linked to our research and education missions.

Fake News in 2017-2018

One of the strengths and weaknesses of a multidisciplinary Center with a large number of participating faculty whose academic homes are in other departments is that faculty do not all converge on a particular sub-topic or research focus. CITS is not poised or intended to be a Center that specializes on one or a few specific topics exclusively and perpetually. Therefore, the most prosperous way to advance as a confederacy of scholars has been to identify broad themes that can match, complement, or entice different researchers' individual interests into a more collective effort, in cycles. In the 2017-2018 academic year, CITS undertook a year-long multi-faceted research, teaching, and outreach theme on the topic of fake news.

Fake news was an attractive topic for CITS for a variety of reasons. It is now common knowledge that fake news and disinformation through the web and social media is a major problem facing societies around the world. Fake news continues to be an intense focus of the technology industry, government, journalism, politics, as well as in marketing and commerce. In the United States, this topic was particularly salient in 2017 as news continued to break about the presence and potential influence of domestically- and externally-generated fake news in the 2016 presidential election. The activities of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, as well as the Russian Internet Research Agency, came to light during the same year that CITS focused on these very phenomena. Fake news was an attractive topic for CITS for one more, important reason as well: The scope of the problem and its understanding requires investigation from social science, computer science, humanities, and other fields, working together. In other words, fake news is, by nature, an interdisciplinary phenomenon. The topic was also a good fit in that some of our affiliated faculty were already doing groundbreaking research on credibility and social media, and involved in other interdisciplinary networks who were working to frame the problem and how academics could respond to its challenges.

Our first major event in these efforts was a symposium in November of 2017, "Is There Any Good News about Fake News?" The full-day event began with a closed-group session of 25 participants, including CITS affiliates from several disciplines, along with visiting academic researchers, as well as industry professionals from the press, fact-checking organizations, and a California-based global social media company. The morning session illuminated how different participants defined the problem, what research and policy questions they were asking, what traditional theoretical and analytic approaches could most usefully be brought to bear on exploring fake news, and what they believed might be the most promising research issues moving forward. The Center was fortunate to have support for this event from a generous advisory board member.

The afternoon portion of the symposium was a panel presentation by four distinguished speakers, which was open to the public and attended by 100 faculty and community members. Speakers included Prof.essor Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar using data science to track the sources of election-related fake news; Maggie Farley, a game developer who showcased an interactive application that improves players' abilities in evaluating the reputation of news sources; Professor Miriam Metzger, a communication scholar who addressed credibility and trust research as applied to the issue of fake news; and Eugene Kiely, the director of FactCheck.org, who discussed its mission, usage, and role in the future.

The next event in our fake news effort was a brainstorming meeting among CITS affiliated faculty, to learn more about individuals' research questions, methodologies, and the potential for collaboration. The meeting was supported by representatives from the university's grants and foundations teams, who listened to presentations and live-searched prospective research funding opportunities.

The third set of activities shifted focus to education and outreach. The Center's doctoral emphasis program conducts a seminar each year, which all Information Technology & Society students must complete at some point during their studies. Consequently, the students who participate in the seminar major in different departments, and come together to share the perspectives of their home disciplines with one another. The doctoral students in the 2018 seminar came from departments of political science, sociology, geography, education, and communication. The core readings for the seminar, likewise, ranged in their interdisciplinary underpinnings. Their foci included the origins of fake news in traditional journalism and in social media, computational underpinnings that facilitate its creation and re-transmission via social media, economic incentives that motivate it, attributes that encourage readership, social network dynamics that reinforce its spread and the gratifications it serves, political and social impacts it potentially renders, psychological biases that resist its dismissal, legal and ethical dilemmas pertaining to its regulation, and potential effects of computational and communication interventions designed to mitigate its influence.

Major objectives of the seminar were to learn about fake news from the variety of perspectives that different disciplines adopt and promote, and then, to translate these approaches into a common language—the language of public understanding. The final product from the seminar represents a synthesis of materials compiled into a stylistically whole document. In respect to the Center's outreach mission, and in light of our status as a public educational institution, the students contributed to a collaboratively-authored reader, designed for public consumption and actively distributed to the public by Center affiliates. The final product is an open-access website, entitled A Citizen's Guide to Fake News, at http://cits.ucsb.edu/​fake-news/​. The contents aimed for about the reading level of an introductory college textbook. Although it is generally accessible, it is also thoroughly annotated with bibliographic references. Sections of the website include What is fake news; A brief history of fake news; Where does fake news come from; The danger of fake news in inflaming or suppressing social conflict; The danger of fake news to our election; How is fake news spread by bots, trolls, microtargeting, and people; Why we fall for fake news; Protecting ourselves from fake news through fact-checkers and their limitations; Games that teach about fake news; and, What can I do today? The website was published in August of 2018, and of this writing (December, 2018), the site has had over 12,000 visitors, who spend, on average, 3 minutes on each page. By many measures, the effort seems to be successful. Similar efforts in the future will aim for publication earlier in the summer, so that secondary and post-secondary education teachers have more opportunity to consider incorporating all or part of such work into their syllabi and lesson plans for the upcoming school year. The fake news efforts continue with original research projects that are underway.

The next focus or theme for CITS's research, education, and outreach efforts focuses on online hate. The growing prevalence of online harassment, racism, and aggression in many forms correlates strongly with the incidence of hate crimes in the physical world, and once again, researchers, policy-makers, technology companies, journalists, and families express growing concern about the increasing toxicity of life online. CITS has begun research meetings, curriculum design, and the identification of visiting researchers who can address this broad concern. Our research and seminar will focus on some subset of topics among the following: racist/ethnic/sexist social media postings, hate speech, hate/ideological websites and discussion fora, trolling (individual, organized, state-sanctioned, automated), doxing, "dog whistles," harassment, uncivil discourse, cyberbullying, etc.; the crossovers of online to offline aggression; the identification, prevalence, and impact of these phenomena; how these activities are socially organized; and remediation efforts such as intervention messages (human and robotic), prejudice reduction, and cohesion-building via social media. We hope once again to gain knowledge, creatively mitigate problems, and help educate industry, government, and the public about this additional, critical concern facing technology and society.

CITS continues to seek new and innovative ways to develop a paradigm of social science, humanistic, and engineering research that accelerates scholarly development to better understand and help shape the complex development, use, and social effects of emerging information technologies. The increasing breadth and depth of our research collaborations enrich our connections to scholars, centers, and institutions throughout the world and hopefully help us to better understand our world.