BCMA Climate Action Podcast Series EP05: Online Misinformation and Disinformation with Yimin Chen

In this fifth episode of our ongoing Climate Leadership & Action for Museums podcast series, we speak with Yimin Chen, a PhD candidate in Library and Information Science in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

His research examines the communicative practices of online communities and cultures, with a focus on Internet trolling behaviours and the controversy surrounding them. His previous projects range from fake news and deception detection, to library automation, to the impact of political memes on social media.

In a world choked with fake news and online misinformation, museums have the potential to leverage the publics’ trust to help communities discern reality from fiction when exploring topics like climate change. In this conversation, we explore the history of online misinformation, why some people choose to act like trolls, and why some online accounts might not even be people at all.

A brief word of warning - this podcast contains explicit language in the context of internet culture and online movements. 

Links:

• Yimin Chen on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=D25U3nsAAAAJ&hl=en 
• The Language & Information Technology Research Lab: https://victoriarubin.fims.uwo.ca/research/
• Bot Sentinel: https://botsentinel.com/