Claire Wardle on The Information Animal Podcast

Dr. https://clairewardle.com/, Associate Professor of Communication at Cornell University, was thinking about the information environment as a system long before most people were. In this episode she and Alicia talk about why that systemic view still gets lost, and what it costs us. We also cover: Why public service broadcasters like the BBC and CBC are struggling to reach a fragmented audience The harm of a constant “drip, drip, drip” of content that never crosses any single legal threshold Paywalls, AI scraping, and who actually pays for local news Why polarization feels like a crisis nationally but much less so at the dog park And Claire’s argument that conspiracy theorists often listen better than institutions do Claire is a leader in the field of misinformation, verification and user generated content. In 2015, Claire co-founded the non-profit http://firstdraftnews.org/, a pioneer in innovation, research and practice in the field of misinformation. She went on to co-found the https://sites.brown.edu/informationfu... at Brown University’s School of Public Health. Over the past decade she has developed an organization-wide training program for the BBC on eyewitness media, verification and misinformation, led social media policy at UNHCR, been a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and been the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Claire also happens to be a collaborator on our work https://carnegieendowment.org/project.... About The Information Animal Podcast The Information Animal Podcast draws on ideas from a book of the same name, exploring modern and historic information ecosystems. This limited series covers concepts like information competition and how an emerging field of information ecology can help us understand the human relationship to the modern information environment. The series is hosted by https://carnegieendowment.org/people/..., who is the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of national information ecosystems. Alicia is the author of https://theinformationanimal.com/.    / @theinformationanimal   past episodes.