Graduate student Mary Blankenship picked through the UNLV Lied Library’s collection of 14 million Twitter posts about the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting on the Strip, hundreds of thousands of which contained false claims about the tragedy.
Blankenship, who is working toward a master’s in chemistry but also does research for Brookings Mountain West, jumped into further research on disinformation and misinformation, both of which relate to the spread of false information, with disinformation specifically disseminated with the intent to harm. She explored other topics, including COVID-19 and claims of election fraud. She uses a program called Twarc, an open-source command line tool, to collect and analyze the Twitter data.
Her focus is now collecting Twitter posts of misinformation about the ongoing crisis on Ukraine, where she was born and lived until she was 8 — and where her family and friends in central Ukraine are setting up refugee centers for citizens fleeing eastern cities like Kiev.
“The history of Ukraine and then the history of the Ukrainian relationship with Russia is very complicated,” Blankenship said. “Disinformation and misinformation have the most success of spreading when it perpetuates the feelings of fear and anger against another group.”
Since she first discovered the library’s archives, Blankenship has collected an additional 500 million Twitter posts spanning the four topics, with COVID-19 misinformation comprising the largest slice, she said. Meanwhile,...
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