University at Buffalo (UB)
About Us
The CII will provide support for collaborative research, public discussions and community outreach on information awareness and resilience, with a focus on these key challenges:
- Understand the root causes of unreliable and misleading information to identify the driving forces, methods, and accelerants behind its spread, and its legal, ethical and political ramifications.
- Develop multi-pronged approaches to combat unreliable and misleading information through robust technological and policy solutions.
- Design scalable, tailored tools to combat unreliable and misleading information, including training modules and innovative communication strategies focused on information and media literacy.
Center Vision
Unreliable and misleading information 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 unreliable information leaves us powerless to prevent the significant harm it causes.
No single approach — technological advances or new regulations — can curb the negative impact of unreliable and misleading information 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 unreliable information, 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 unreliable and misleading information in key areas of public life, including public health (e.g., vaccine hesitancy) climate change, and the integrity of democratic processes.
