Disinformation: Moral Panic or Threat to Democracy?

Discussants:

• Freddie Sayers, Editor-in-Chief & CEO, UnHerd

• Renee DiResta, Associate Research Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

Moderator:

• Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director, The Future of Free Speech

Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations to spammers and scammers to issues related to child safety. From 2019-2023, she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies.

Freddie Sayers is a journalist, commentator, and media entrepreneur. As CEO of Old Queen Street Media, he is the Publisher of leading titles including The Spectator and UnHerd. Under his leadership, UnHerd has solidified its reputation as a platform that challenges mainstream thinking and amplifies heterodox ideas and voices. In September 2024, Old Queen Street Media acquired The Spectator, the oldest continuously-published weekly in the English language.

Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia’s Global Freedom of Expression Center. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, published by Basic Books in 2022.