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It is a pleasure to invite you to the in-person workshop in Utrecht on ‘Networks of (mis)information'. The workshop aims to address the potential dangers of the spread of (mis)information in (online) communities that are increasingly gaining attention from researchers, policymakers, and the general public. The workshop will be interdisciplinary, and the aim is to foster collaboration among researchers from philosophy, social sciences, data science, and related fields.

The program will feature two keynote lectures and an interactive component. Keynotes:

(Northeastern ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��): Sociotechnical Epistemology: Knowledge in an Algorithmic World

Abstract: How should we structure epistemic processes and practices in our diverse, interconnected, and technologically-mediated societies? This talk introduces sociotechnical epistemology as a framework for navigating this question. Extending the insights of social and network epistemology, sociotechnical epistemology focuses attention on how communities of knowers both configure and are configured by AI technologies, and on the intertwined epistemic and political implications of this relation. I develop this agenda by drawing on recent research, including work on (i) diversity and disagreement in AI development pipelines, and (ii) the use of large language models as surrogates for human participants. These cases illustrate the benefits of attending to both directions of the sociotechnical relation. On the one hand, they show how attention to social dimensions of knowledge production can improve AI design and governance. On the other, they highlight the need to expand philosophical analyses of epistemic harms beyond interpersonal and structural factors, to systematically account for the technological dimensions of knowledge production and distribution. By articulating sociotechnical epistemology as a research program, the hope is to unify disparate lines of work into a set of conceptual and methodological resources for understanding epistemic risks and opportunities in an algorithmic world, and to chart pathways for more epistemically resilient and just institutions of knowledge.

(Leipzig ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��): The limits of accuracy nudges—and the power of networks—in misinformation dynamics 

Abstract: Why can misinformation spread in digital environments even without the intent of the individuals involved? At the individual level, one explanation is that online users form sincere but ideologically aligned beliefs when confronted with novel information. In an experiment with 1,344 conservative and liberal participants in the United States, monetary incentives failed to eliminate most partisan differences in veracity judgments of politically sensitive (true or false) news messages, with the majority of the bias persisting even under strong accuracy motivations. This grim result underscores the limited power of interventions relying on appeals to accuracy when individuals genuinely—but mistakenly—believe false partisan claims to be true. At the network level, the ideological segregation of online communities operates as an architecture for spreading ideologically aligned falsehoods. In controlled network experiments, producing hundreds of diffusion processes of news messages in parallel participant populations (or “multiple worlds”), false information circulated more widely on segregated than on integrated networks. This demonstrates that network structure alone can undermine information quality by disproportionately enabling the diffusion of ideologically welcome content that is otherwise too implausible to spread. Together, these findings highlight a dual misinformation challenge: individuals sincerely misjudge unfamiliar information in line with ideology, while segregated networks structurally help the spreading of falsehoods that only few belief in. The individual-level mechanism is difficult to unwind, as people rarely change. Instead, this research contributes to the debate on structural interventions as the necessary levers to epistemic resilience in digital environments.

The interactive component will consist of three focused sessions initiated by pitches from Utrecht scholars, designed to stimulate in-depth discussions and foster collaborative connections around specific themes and issues related to networks, (mis)information, and polarization.

The program will start with a lunch at 12.00 and ends with drinks.  Location is ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Library City Centre: Drift 27, room E1.25 ‘‘Tielezaal’’ (zone E). There will be signposting in the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Library to guide participants to the room.

This workshop is connected to the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��'s strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies.