Next After Hours on election rumors: How Do You Know What to Believe?

Rumors are a common way for people to make sense of uncertainty. Emerging technologies from social media to AI have been a boon to misinformation, however, and have sown not just rumors but confusion and distrust. These days, how do we know what to believe?

At our next S+T at UW After Hours, we’ll host the Center for an Informed Public’s Mert Can Bayar, who works on the Election Rapid Research team, in conversation with Monika Sengul-Jones, to talk about rumors, conspiracies, technology, and democracy. CIP’s research on election rumors has shown that misleading stories rarely rely on entirely fabricated evidence. More often, real events are misinterpreted, exaggerated, stripped of context, or assigned false intent.