Dr. Cailin O'Connor, Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2019), spoke on the topic of "Curation as Misinformation" for this CRL webinar.

Every day we see information about the world – but all this information is filtered, shaped, and curated through a myriad of processes. Journalists decide what is interesting or important enough to report on. Industry propagandists and politicians try to influence our understandings of the world by picking just some events to talk about. Social media algorithms extend the reach of some facts, while deflating others.  How do these processes shape what we end up believing? In this talk, Prof. O'Connor shows how curation – the sharing of real, accurate, but incomplete information – can be just as potent a form of misinformation as lying or fraud.

Regulation of misinformation has tended to focus on suppressing actively false claims, with relatively little attention to how true claims can mislead. Prof. O'Connor argues that this is shortsighted, and show why we need to spend just as much time thinking about curation as we do about lies.