FP Virtual Dialogue: How to Stop Fake News

Ravi Agrawal is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy. Before joining FP, Agrawal worked at CNN for more than a decade, including his most recent position as the network’s New Delhi bureau chief and correspondent. Previously, he served as a senior producer in CNN’s New York and London bureaus, receiving a Peabody Award and three Emmy nominations for his work. Agrawal is the author of India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy. He is a graduate of Harvard University.

Justine Isola has been at Facebook since 2016 and now leads the team responsible for developing Facebook’s misinformation policies. Justine previously advised U.S. tech companies on international expansion and started her career as a journalist, which included working as a fact-checker. She has a BA in English from Yale University and an MA in International Policy from Stanford University.

Prior to joining the Commission, Věra Jourová was Minister for Regional Development in the Czech Republic. From 2006 to 2013, Jourová directed her own international consultancy on European Union funding and advised on activities relating to European Union Accession in the Western Balkans. She was Deputy Minister for Regional Development from 2003 to 2006 and Head of the Department of Regional Development in the Vysočina Region from 2001 to 2003. Previously, she served as Secretary and Spokesperson of the Třebič Municipal Office, from 1995 to 2001. Jourová holds a MA in Law and a MA in the Theory of Culture from the Charles University in Prague.

As dean and CEO of Northwestern Qatar, Marwan M. Kraidy oversees academic programs in communication, journalism, and the liberal arts. In addition to his position at NU-Q, he is also a professor of communication and the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture at Northwestern’s School of Communication.

Kraidy, a scholar of global communication and an authority on Arab media, culture, and politics, has long been immersed in the study of geopolitics and media in the Middle East. He has published 13 books and edited volumes, authored 130 essays and chapters, including ‘The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World,’ which received the Times Higher Education Book of the Year title and won the Best Book Award from the International Communication Association’s Division of Global Communication.

Kraidy’s latest project is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow endowed book on war machines in the digital age, focusing on how the “Islamic State” leveraged on global communication platforms and tactics to spread global hostility and insecurity.

Prior to Northwestern, Kraidy served as associate dean for administration and professor of global communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of School for Communication. He was also the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture, and director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, an institute he founded in 2013.

Kraidy has been the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Albert Bonnier Jr. Professor of Media Studies at Stockholm University, the Chaire Dupront at Sorbonne-Universités in Paris, and visiting professor at universities in China, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the USA.

Kraidy earned his bachelor’s degree in communication arts from Notre-Dame University in Louaizé, Lebanon, and his Lebanese baccalaureate in humanities at Saint Joseph College in Antoura, Lebanon. He holds a Ph.D. in mass communication from Ohio University, where he also earned his master’s degree.

Annelise Riles is Northwestern University’s Associate Provost for Global Affairs, the Executive Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and a professor of law and anthropology. Her scholarship spans a wide range of substantive areas including human rights, managing and accommodating cultural differences, and the regulation of the global financial markets. Dr. Riles has conducted legal and anthropological research in China, Japan and the Pacific and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Fijian. She is also the founder and director of Meridian-180, a multilingual forum for transformative leadership. She received an AB from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Cambridge.

Olga Yurkova is a journalist and cofounder of StopFake.org, an independent Ukrainian organization that trains an international cohort of fact-checkers in an effort to curb propaganda and misinformation in the media. Olga Yurkova teaches different audiences how propaganda works and how to identify fake news,
consulting on a range of organizations and public structures and collaborating with mainstream media as a journalist. Olga Yurkova explores propaganda methods and finds out new ways to overcome these new challenges. In June 2017, she and her colleagues Maarten Schenk and Jordy Nijenhuis launched a project called Forbidden Facts, which explains how fake news spreads online through clickbait headlines on Facebook that reach out to skeptical audiences. Olga Yurkova has 15 years of experience in journalism. She headed the local multimedia newsroom in Ternopil city for six years, becoming the market leader during that time. She then ran the Donbas and Crimea department at the national multimedia newsroom Nova Informacia for three years. She has been working as a new media trainer since 2012. For fighting propaganda, Olga Yurkova was included into the list of New Europe 100 and was named a TED Fellow in 2018.