EAGER: DCL: SaTC: Enabling Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Combatting Disinformation and Racial Bias: A Deep-Learning-Assisted Investigation of Temporal Dynamics of Disinformation

  • Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Total publications:0 publications

Grant number: 2210137

Grant search

Key facts

  • Disease

    COVID-19
  • Start & end year

    2022
    2024
  • Known Financial Commitments (USD)

    $300,000
  • Funder

    National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Principal Investigator

    Kookjin Lee
  • Research Location

    United States of America
  • Lead Research Institution

    Arizona State University
  • Research Priority Alignment

    N/A
  • Research Category

    Policies for public health, disease control & community resilience

  • Research Subcategory

    Communication

  • Special Interest Tags

    N/A

  • Study Type

    Non-Clinical

  • Clinical Trial Details

    N/A

  • Broad Policy Alignment

    Pending

  • Age Group

    Unspecified

  • Vulnerable Population

    Other

  • Occupations of Interest

    Unspecified

Abstract

This project explores the diffusion of racial disinformation online and its social impacts, particularly focusing on Asian Americans. While the hatred and bias against Asian Americans have become notable amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian-targeting disinformation has yet been fully explored. The project's novelties are in unique multidisciplinary approaches to (1) detect Asian-targeting disinformation and its countermeasure messages, and understand how they are spread on the web, (2) examine how the spread of disinformation and countermeasure messages on the web is associated with the intensity of the bias and hate crimes against Asian Americans, and (3) develop various data-driven computational models to help understanding the disinformation dynamics. The project's broader significance and importance are to inform civil society, including advocacy organizations and the general public, about how to strategize communication efforts in battling racial disinformation, and to make the developed tools and outcomes publicly available for broader uses.

The project takes three-staged approaches. The main objective of the first phase is to develop computational tools for the detection and analysis of the temporal dynamics between Asian-targeted disinformation and countermeasures on the Web. A specific focus is on developing automated identification tools and deep-learning classification models by feature-engineering unique characteristics of disinformation. The objective of the second phase is to understand to what extent the spread of disinformation and countermeasures online is associated with the societal trend of implicit bias and hate crime occurrences against Asian Americans in the real-world, which can be achieved via developing deep-learning causality models. The objective of the third phase is to design scalable data-driven deep-learning models of disinformation dynamics in macro and micro levels, identifying unknown dynamics from the real-world measurements, which also enables simulations of the learned dynamics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.