The Digital Disinformation Hub of the HBI bundles the Institute's research and cooperation activities in the field of digital disinformation.
In the last years, disinformation has revealed itself to be a complex and ever-relevant research topic, as it constantly becomes more entrenched in contemporary communications by presenting itself in different guises. The complexity of these phenomena lies in great part in its multidisciplinarity, which poses researchers with different nature and yet intertwined challenges.
Considering the Institute’s solid tradition in interdisciplinary media studies, the Digital Disinformation Hub is a research project aiming at strengthening the Institute’s contributions to this debate by: enhancing multidisciplinary collaborations among researchers; gathering and systematically bringing together existing internal and external research expertise in the field of disinformation; fomenting conceptual and epistemological approaches to disinformation and building external collaborations.
The goals for the first year of the DigDisHub include:
- to collect and systematically bundle existing research expertise in the field of disinformation across all HBI colleagues in the form of a sustainable internal collaboration,
- to develop an agreed theoretical understanding of disinformation, its different observable types as well as its potential risks for public communication, opinion formation and social cohesion,
- to increase the visibility of current and future expertise at the HBI through classical and new forms of knowledge transfer and collaboration with both colleagues in academia and those from relevant stakeholders such as policy makers, regulators, media, journalism, intermediaries and civil society, and
- to conduct research to determine the state of the art in publications on digital disinformation, identify research gaps and strategically target future research on those theoretical and empirical aspects that still reveal gaps.
In February 2022, the Hub hosted an expert workshop on "Opportunities in Disinformation Research from a Governance Perspective". This resulted in a three-part open access article series in the online journal
Internet Policy Review, discussing ways to deal with the conceptual challenges, empirical evidence and potential of new institutions for the governance of disinformation.
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