The State of Disinformation with Shireen Mitchell

What are we to believe nowadays?

It’s a question most of us have asked since social media platforms began competing with traditional media outlets in the 2010s. Everyone has the power to push out information and that is actually a good thing. We saw the power of citizen journalism during the Ferguson Uprisings and how they helped to push out culturally competent narratives when local and national media failed to do so.

But what happens when people abuse, say, Twitter to spend lies that most folks don’t have the education or bandwidth to cross check? Or worse, you can have a billionaire like Elon Musk take over that platform and he can all but sanction disinformation simply because he owns it and the U.S. government has few legal tools to stop him—at least for now.

This episode of Black Diplomats will feature one of the United States’ top disinformation experts, Shireen Mitchell, President of Stop Online Violence Against Women. Shireen has been a leading voice on online disinformation against women for  over a decade. She has  published numerous studies on the impact unchecked harassment has had on women, particularly women of color. She was one of the first scholars to warn about misogyny online against Black women and the impact it has had on women of color at large. 

During our discussion, we talked about how she was one of the first online disinformation experts to draw parallels between unchecked misogyny against Black and Russian disinformation campaigns that dogged the 2026 Presidential Election. Then we unpacked how European regulators monitor social media platforms in ways that the U.S. refuses to do and why that is. Then we deep dive into mainstream media’s failure to learn from past mistakes of platforming liars all in the name of ratings. And, yes, we are talking about that debacle of a CNN Trump town hall! And boy did he turn it into a superspreader disinformation event. What harm will that event and those that follow have on U.S. media literacy and the rest of the world. That and much more on this week’s episode of Black Diplomats.

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