The Stan and Toba Kaplowitz Lecture featuring Dr. Brendan Nyhan
Wed, September 30, 2026
6:00 PM
at Auditorium, Kellogg Center
Kaplowitz Distinguished Lecture Series
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM (Lecture) and 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM (Reception)
Place: Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center | Lecture (Auditorium) and Reception (Red Cedar AB)
Speaker:
Dr. Brendan Nyhan, James O. Freedman Presidential Professor
Dartmouth College | School of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Government
Brendan Nyhan is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Nyhan, a former Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former Guggenheim Fellow and Carnegie Fellow. He is co-director of Bright Line Watch, a watchdog monitoring the status of American democracy; a former contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times; co-founder of Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin syndicated in the Philadelphia Inquirer; and co-author of All the President's Spin, a New York Times bestseller.
Lecture:
Misunderstanding the Harms of Online Misinformation
Misperceptions threaten to warp mass opinion and public policy on controversial issues in politics, science, and health, but we should beware data-free claims and moral panics. This talk reviews the evidence on several widely held myths about misinformation: that most Americans are in online echo chambers, that false news and extreme content are widely consumed, that social media causes widespread harms, and that fact-checks usually backfire. In each case, the conventional wisdom misunderstands the problem in ways that could undermine efforts to effectively address it.
