This book explores the consequences of the changing landscape of media communication on Black interactions in the virtual space. Current developments in technology, such as facial recognition, have already disproportionately affected people of color, especially people of African descent. The rise of DeepFakes and other forms of Fake News online has brought a host of new impacts and potential obstacles to the way that Black communities communicate. With a focus on the emergence of DeepFakes, and AI Synthetic Media, contributors have explored a range of themes and topics, including but not limited to: How do AI and digital algorithms impact people of color? How does Social Media shape Black women's perception of their body? How vulnerable are young Africans to social media generated fake news? Contributions have examined how Black virtual, in person and digital communication is affected by the current onslaught of misinformation, manipulated images and videos, and changing social media landscape.

In this book established researchers draw on a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives to examine social media’s impact on American politics. Chapters critically examine activism in the digital age, fake news, online influence, messaging tactics, news transparency and authentication, consumers’ digital habits and ultimately the societal impacts that continue to be created by combining social media and politics. Through this book readers will better understand and approach with questions such as: • How exactly and why did social media become a powerful factor in politics? • What responsibilities do social networks have in the proliferation of factually wrong and hate-filled messages? Or should individuals be held accountable? • What are the state-of-the-art of computational techniques for measuring and determining social media's impact on society? • What role does online activism play in today’s political arena? • What does the potent combination of social media and politics truly mean for the future of democracy? The insights and debates found herein provide a stronger understanding of the core issues and steer us toward improved curriculum and research aimed at a better democracy. Democracy in the Disinformation Age: Influence and Activism in American Politics will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics with an interest in areas including political science, media studies, mass communication, PR, and journalism.

This book shows how disinformation spread by partisan organizations and media platforms undermines institutional legitimacy on which authoritative information depends.

How can we build back truth online? Here’s how. How can we build back truth online? In this book, researcher Leslie F. Stebbins provides solutions for repairing our existing social media platforms and building better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties, and promote access to trustworthy information. Stebbins provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, how we can learn to embrace agency in our interactions with digital spaces, how to build tools to reduce harmful practices, how platform companies can prioritize the public good, how we can repair journalism, and how to strengthen curation to promote trusted content and create new, healthier digital public squares. New, experimental models that are ethically designed to build community and promote trustworthy content are having some early successes. We know that human social networks—online and off—magnify whatever they are seeded with. They are not neutral. We also know that to repair our systems we need to repair their design. We are being joined in the fight by some of the best and brightest minds of our current generation as they flee big tech companies in search of vocations that value integrity and public values. The problem of misinformation is not insurmountable. We can fix this.

The unprecedented spread of false and misleading information is the flip side of the Internet's promise of universal access and information democratization. This volume features original contributions from scholars working on the challenge of misinformation across a wide range of STEM, humanities, and art disciplines. Modeling a collaborative, multidisciplinary "convergence approach," Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload is structured in three parts. Part one, "Misinformation and Artificial Intelligence," confronts the danger of outsourcing judgement and decision-making to AI instruments in key areas of public life, from the processing of loan applications to school funding, policing, and criminal sentencing. Part two, "Science Communication," foregrounds the need to rethink how scientific findings are communicated to the public, calling on scientists to cooperate with colleagues in other disciplines and community representatives to help minimize the negative effects of mis/disinformation in such vital areas as climate change science and public health. Part three, "Building Trust," further advocates for and explores instances of trust-building initiatives as a necessary precondition of both community-oriented scholarly activity and effective intervention strategies in high impact areas such as public health.

Although some progress has been made in recent decades in getting women into top positions in government, business and education, there are persisting challenges with efforts to improve opportunities for women in leadership. This essential second edition of the Handbook of Research on Gender and Leadership comprises the latest research from the world’s foremost scholars on women and leadership, exposing problems and offering both theoretical and practical solutions on strengthening the impact of women worldwide.

In the current day and age, objective facts have less influence on opinions and decisions than personal emotions and beliefs. Many individuals rely on their social networks to gather information thanks to social media’s ability to share information rapidly and over a much greater geographic range. However, this creates an overall false balance as people tend to seek out information that is compatible with their existing views and values. They deliberately seek out “facts” and data that specifically support their conclusions and classify any information that contradicts their beliefs as “false news.” Navigating Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Misinformation in a Post-Truth World is a collection of innovative research on human and automated methods to deter the spread of misinformation online, such as legal or policy changes, information literacy workshops, and algorithms that can detect fake news dissemination patterns in social media. While highlighting topics including source credibility, share culture, and media literacy, this book is ideally designed for social media managers, technology and software developers, IT specialists, educators, columnists, writers, editors, journalists, broadcasters, newscasters, researchers, policymakers, and students.