Misinformation, Networks, and Politics: From Plato to Now
In October 2018, Twitter released nine million tweets believed to be from the Russian Internet Research Agency, tweets that often aimed to influence European and American political and social life. But this is not a new phenomenon! Since Plato banned poets from his ideal Republic, philosophers and politicians have argued about the effects of propaganda in political and social life.
This course invites you to put political uses of “fake news” as propaganda in historical context—from Plato to the invention of the printing press to Twitter—and to learn how to use network visualizations to track how information bubbles can thrive. The computational approach will teach you—from the ground up—how to explore and track the role of interpersonal connections in the spread of misinformation and propaganda.
We will explore which problems are distinctly new and which can be fruitfully analyzed as modern versions of age-old philosophical and ethical questions. Questions central to the course include:
How does information spread in a community and to what effect?
How does technology (understood broadly, from the invention of writing to radio to the Web) change social and political communities?
What sources of information do we trust and how do we select them?
And, finally, what is the difference between information, data, and knowledge?
We will start the semester by focusing on a historical survey of key approaches to these concerns: from Plato’s critique of writing as a corrupting technology in The Phaedrus, to the spread of print culture in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Encyclopedic project of the Enlightnement, to questions around the uses of news (and “news”) in political and social life.
