Ocepek and Sanfilippo co-edit book on misinformation

Melissa Ocepek
Melissa Ocepek, Assistant Professor
Madelyn Sanfilippo
Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

"From QAnon on Facebook to the common nonsense of password security, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons presents a variety of case studies to explore misinformation in new ways that focus less on the current political moment and more on the common experiences of everyday life," said Ocepek. "The book also contributes to the Knowledge Commons Framework by identifying trends in the case studies that support a need to address the importance of community norms and context."

In addition to Ocepek and Sanfilippo, chapter authors include Associate Professor Kate McDowell, Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes, and BSIS student Smita Nair. According to the editors, the book highlights how communities manage issues of credibility, trust, and information quality continuously, to mitigate the impact of misinformation when possible. 

"This book offered a wonderful opportunity to explore how communities that people spend time in everyday—social media, interest-based communities, and digital layers to their local communities—deal with misinformation in effective and ineffective ways," added Sanfilippo. "In looking at the ubiquity of misinformation and human efforts to restrain it, we get a sense that we really can’t treat all misinformation the same way, nor can we expect top-down interventions from government or platforms to handle the issues in the ways that work best for different communities."

Ocepek's research and teaching interests include everyday information behavior, cultural theory, critical theory, food studies, and research methods. She holds a BA in sociology and political science from Pepperdine University and a PhD in information science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sanfilippo's research empirically explores governance of sociotechnical systems as well as outcomes, inequality, and consequences within these systems. She earned her MIS and PhD in information science from Indiana University.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."

Carboni joins the iSchool faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Nicola Carboni has joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in digital humanities at the University of Geneva.

Nicola Carboni

Youth-AI-Safety named a winning team in international hackathon

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Chan to present "Predatory Data" work at named lectures

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will present research drawn from her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, at two named lectures this month. The lectures, which celebrate Women's History Month, will be held at the University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon University.

Anita Say Chan