Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center receives $ 2 million from Knight Foundation to fight disinformation | New

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The Knight Foundation announced in July a $ 2 million grant to Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to promote research on disinformation, disinformation and how best to regulate online platforms.

The Berkman Klein Center plans to use the funds to develop a new initiative called “Rebooting Social Media,†a three-year initiative that will explore ways to tackle disinformation and a rapidly polarizing digital landscape.

The grant was the largest among a group of donations announced by the Knight Foundation on July 21, which totaled $ 5.5 million. The funds go to efforts to “understand how technology is transforming our democracy” and to enable “evidence-based decisions on how to govern and manage the now digital public square,” according to a press release.

John Sands, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation, said the Berkman Klein Center is uniquely positioned to make the most of the donation.

“There aren’t many places and centers of academic study that have the kind of talent, resources and research infrastructure that Berkman Klein needs to be able to lead the collaborative enterprise that we think is necessary. to identify solutions to some of the information challenges we now face, â€Sands said.

Sands added that the Knight Foundation has “a long-standing relationship” with the Berkman Klein Center and those leading the Centre’s projects, particularly Harvard Law School professor Jonathan L. Zittrain.

“We are confident in the Center’s ability to bring together the types of people for the kind of extended, solution-driven exploration that we believe needs to be an important part of the process to meet these challenges,” Sands said.

Berkman Klein Center director James W. Mickens said that in addition to research efforts, the Center plans to use the donation to develop workshops and bring together various experts to address pressing platform issues. digital.

“One thing we’re going to do is run workshops and other types of programming like hackathons to bring together academics, programmers, people from civil society and public policy – to bring all of those people together to s ‘tackling some of these big issues involving social media,’ Mickens said.

Mickens said the Center “tries to be intentionally interdisciplinary” in its research efforts and wants to hear a “diversity of perspectives” not only at the industry level, but also in terms of race and gender.

“I hope that if we are successful by leveraging all of these diverse perspectives, we will be able to deliver solutions that work for society as a whole, as opposed to the people these technology platforms sometimes narrowly target,†he said. Mickens said. “We really want to find solutions that make social media work for society as a whole. “

– Editor Emmy M. Cho can be reached at [email protected].

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