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About

The Disinformation Project at the School of Communication is a SSHRC funded research that examines fake news discourses on Canadian news media and social media. The Project is run by Ahmed Al-Rawi, an Associate Professor at the School of Communication, who is its Project Director, working collaboratively with a number of researchers and graduate students.  

Objectives

There are five main objectives behind conducting this study.

1.     To understand how Canadian journalists define disinformation and fake news and identify the way they deal with this phenomenon.

2.     To explore fake news coverage and its scope by categorizing Canadian news stories into types using news values theory.

3.     To find the major topics discussed on Canadian news media and social media posts that reference fake news, disinformation, misinformation, and false news by partly using machine learning methods.

4.     To provide a clearer conceptualization and operationalization of disinformation in order to expand existing theories and methodologies based on the examination of previous research and the coding of news stories and social media posts.

5. Explore the spread of misinformation across different platforms within the Canadian context. 

What is fake news?

Ahmed Al-Rawi shares his thoughts.

Watch now

Contact us

To learn more about The Disinformation Project and for media inquiries, please contact us at the email provided below.

aalrawi@sfu.ca