As part of the Center for an Informed Public’s ongoing interdisciplinary work exploring the ways mis- and disinformation shapes and is shaped by law and policy, we’ve hosted prominent legal scholars to interface with the CIP’s community in Seattle — our faculty members, researchers, students and other on-campus colleagues — through meetings, special talks and other exchanges of ideas.
In a Q&A series with these visiting legal fellows, CIP co-founder Ryan Calo, a professor at the UW School of Law and Information School, interviews Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia Law professor, 2019 MacArthur Fellow and author of The Fight for Privacy Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age (Norton, 2022); Olivier Sylvain, a Fordham University Law professor, Federal Trade Commission advisor, and noted information and communication law and policy scholar; and Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University and author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Scroll down for three Q&A interviews with Citron, Sylvain, and Waldman, where they share insights about their interests in studying misinformation, where those interests intersect their respective research agendas and identify areas where misinformation deserves more attention and study by legal scholars and others in academia.
And stay tuned for other upcoming CIP law and policy discussions, including around the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court cases Gonzalez v. Google LLC and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh that could shape the future of platform liability.
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Intimate privacy rights, deepfakes and patterns of abuse that target personal reputation
The University of Virginia’s Danielle Citron — who studies intimate privacy rights and how cyberstalkers use deepfake photos and videos in their patterns of abuse to defame their targets, oftentimes women whose faces are superimposed on pornographic imagery — noted that “this perfect storm of abuse always included misinformation that was meant to destroy personal reputation,” Citron said in an October 2022 interview with Calo. “The misinformation not only damaged reputation and exposed private information, but it made you vulnerable to physical attack.”
In her work, Citron said that she’s interested in all the ways online information and information more generally is being “used to silence and to terrify, terrorize and to marginalize women, not only in the #MeToo movement but also as we’re seeing in national security, that female politicians, lies about them online, are driving politicians across the globe — female politicians — out of politics,” noting the implications for democratic institutions and for national security.
Citron said that scholars have long studied and understood that with behavioral economics, people are oftentimes bad decision makers. “We seize onto the negative and the novel,” she said, “and the positive fades away in memory.” But with younger generations that have grown up exposed to various kinds of digital fakery, Citron said that she’s interested in better understanding “the ways in which video and audio still seem to seize us, grab us in the gut and never leave us.”
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Understanding how misinformation targets historically marginalized groups
Olivier Sylvain, a Fordham University professor and noted scholar of information and communication law and policy, discusses how misinformation intersects his areas of research, including the ways disparate distribution of information can target historically marginalized groups in ways that exclude them from opportunities.
“I am deeply interested in the questions of misinformation because historically, I’m concerned as a general matter — I think I don’t think I’m alone — that as with the deployment of infrastructure and the ways in which information is used has been to the detriment of historically marginalized groups,” Sylvain said. He noted how misinformation about elections and vaccinations can sometimes be rooted in true historical facts but aren’t accurate in the ways they populate and are shared within today’s information environments. “These are the kinds of concerns that have always animated my interest in information law and policy and communication law and policy.”
Sylvain discusses previous work studying housing ads where automated systems used by social media companies enable advertisers to target information based on protected categories, explaining how information that is unevenly distributed is most likely to harm historically marginalized groups.
At the time of his May 2022 interview with Calo, Sylvain was on leave from Fordham University and serving in a short-term appointment as a special advisor at the Federal Trade Commission. He visited the CIP and the University of Washington in his personal capacity as a scholar of informational inequality and didn’t discuss or share nonpublic work of the FTC during his visit.
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Whether courts believe misinformation over medical or scientific consensus
In his April 2022 Q&A interview with Calo, Northeastern University’s Ari Ezra Waldman, a renowned expert in information privacy law, discusses how his research interests have shifted toward better understanding the ways misinformation targets vulnerable communities, including queer and transgender people.
Pointing to various cases challenging the rights to seek an abortion or gender-affirming hormone therapy, Waldman noted how some right-wing groups, lawyers and think tanks are “using misinformation to manufacture a kind of uncertainty such that it will allow the courts to let the legislature ban gender-affirming hormone therapy or let the legislature ban abortion.”
Waldman said that while there’s no medical science to back up some of the wild claims being made, like abortion causing cancer and infertility, “if all you need is a citation, a little parenthetical to an article in a seemingly well respected journal,” then a conservative judge can say the science is uncertain and allow lawmakers to take legislative action, Waldman said. With that, “then almost all of our civil rights are at risk. So these are critical questions that are going to determine the future of equality and equity and liberation for marginalized populations.”
