Our guest this week is Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the Hussman school of Journalism and Media at Univesrity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Our host spoke to Freelon about how foreign adversaries, and particularly the Internet Research Agency in Russia, are using social media platforms against us. We explore how foreign governments wage disinformation campaigns against us, who they target and why. Are they succeeding? And what can we do as news and information consumers to avoid falling for this nefarious form of misinformation?

Freelon is known for his coding and computational methods to extract, preprocess and analyze large sets of data. He has researched how misinformation is spread and what people can do to prevent the spread of false information. Freelon has published over 30 peer reviewed journal articles and contributed extensive research to the Knight Foundation.  In the past few years, Freelon has done substantial analyses about the impact of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns on Twitter related to our elections and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Is that a fact? is a production of the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit building a national movement to create a more news-literate America. Our host is Darragh Worland, our producer is Mike Webb, our editor is Timothy Kramer, and our theme music is by Eryn Busch.