New Pitt Lab to combat digital disinformation

The University of Pittsburgh is staking a claim in the battle against false narratives and conspiracy theories that spread online with the speed of light.

Pitt officials said they hope to tap a new venture — the Pitt Disinformation Lab in the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security — to build a community-based network to detect, study and combat malicious information in the digital world.

David Hickton, the founding director of the institute, served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2016. He said he learned how dangerous online misinformation can be when he oversaw a series of investigations into how online narratives influenced cybercrime, hate crime and domestic terrorism. His pioneering work led to charges against cybercriminals in Russia and China, as well as locally, and gave him a ringside seat to the evolving power of the digital world.

Ultimately, Hickton concluded overcoming disinformation would require efforts at the national and local levels.

“People don’t apply as much scrutiny when they hear something online as when they hear it in person or read it in the newspaper. … It’s not just the federal government and social media platforms that have a role to play in combating disinformation,” Hickton said. “The animating vision of (the Pitt Disinformation Lab) is to build local resilience to disinformation right here, right now.”

Michael Colaresi, the Pitt political scientist who will steer the new venture, said it will focus on the same approach officials have taken to overcoming vaccine hesitance. The lab plans to engage with a broad network and cultivate trusted community, civic and faith leaders to fight dangerous misinformation before it becomes deadly or destabilizing.

It’s easy and dangerous to ignore such issues, he said.

“There is this illusion that social media is somehow separate and disconnected from reality and our pre-pandemic communities,” Colaresi said.

They are not. That’s been proven repeatedly in recent months as false narratives about the 2020 election and the covid-19 vaccine spread online. Both narratives have real-world consequences, threatening the region’s health and security and undermining faith in processes as fundamental as voting.

“If we buy into that illusion and keep our heads in the cloud, we become trapped in a not-so-funhouse of mirrors where facts and truth are difficult or even impossible to discern,” Colaresi said. “Our best chance to fight the centrifugal forces spinning disinformation is to make sure we have our feet on the ground in Western Pennsylvania.”

Hickton stressed this is not an effort to censor communication.

“It should be the case, I believe, that we all have the right to express our differences,” Hickton said. “But we ought to have a common basis of facts.”

Colaresi said fighting disinformation, such as the unfounded conspiracy theories that contributed to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, won’t be simple or quick.

“At the edges, there are people who have a vested interest in illusions and fictions, and that is going to be difficult to change, but there are a lot of people who are open to perspectives. Everywhere, from churches to communities, there are leaders people trust for the flow of information. They care, and they don’t want their communities to suffer,” Colaresi said.

He hopes the lab can find ways to provide early warnings about harmful false narratives incubating online and provide strategies to combat them at the community level.