About Us

Understand the root causes of mis/disinformation to identify the driving forces, methods, and accelerants behind its spread, and its legal, ethical and political ramifications.
Develop multi-pronged approaches to combat mis/disinformation through robust technological and policy solutions.
Design scalable, tailored tools to combat disinformation, including training modules and innovative communication strategies focused on information and media literacy.

Mis/disinformation is one of the most serious threats to civil society and democracy that we face both in the United States and globally. Our limited capability to check the creation and spread of mis/disinformation leaves us powerless to prevent the significant harm it causes. No single approach - neither technological advances nor new regulations - can curb the negative impact of mis/disinformation on its own.

Technical solutions will always be temporary since malicious actors will find ways to circumvent them. Democratic governments have limited ability to curtail mis/disinformation, and ethical and political questions arise around the desirability to allocate remedial responses to government institutions. We need socio-technological solutions that can address root causes and balance the rights to privacy and free speech, along with partnerships with community and other stakeholders to address public health and social justice concerns.

The Center for Information Integrity (CII) brings together nationally-renowned faculty from across academic disciplines—computer and data science, communications and linguistics, law and political science, medicine and public health, learning and information sciences, geography and psychology, and the humanities—to identify, evaluate, and mitigate the impact of mis/disinformation in key areas of public life, including public health (e.g., vaccine hesitancy) climate change, and the integrity of democratic processes.