The Methodological Unit organizes a weekly Brown Bag Seminar to highlight novel methodological approaches in humanities and social sciences. The idea of the meetings is to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch. Bring your own lunch, we bring fresh methodological topics!
Every Wednesday at 12.15.
You are welcome to join us at seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A (access via door, not courtyard), 5th floor, or online via Zoom.
There will be a 20-minute introduction to the methodological theme, followed by an open discussion of 40 minutes. The seminars are open to everybody. We expect a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience from different faculties and units of the central campus. The language of the meetings can be Finnish or English.
The most important prerequisite for participation is not methodological expertise, but an open mind towards new methodological innovations and discussion across methodological and disciplinary boundaries.
Scroll down for the upcoming program of Brown Bag Seminars. To get notified on updates sign up for our mailing list or follow us on social media.
Climate disinformation is often assumed to circulate within ideological echo chambers. But what if it doesn't stay contained? This talk presents findings from analysing over 12 million tweets during COP26 and COP27, revealing how climate disinformation actively flows outward across community boundaries through unexpected pathways and unlikely intermediaries.
Using a trained machine learning classifier on validated climate datasets, we assigned disinformation probabilities to tweets denying or undermining scientific consensus on climate change. Community detection algorithms identified distinct user clusters, and social network analysis traced information flows between disinformation, mixed, and non-disinformation communities.
Most striking is the discovery of inadvertent brokers; users becoming disinformation vectors without seemingly intending to. A journalist sharing a video of a tired-looking president at COP26 became a top disinformation mediator as climate skeptics weaponized the clip for conspiratorial narratives.
The talk addresses: To what extent is disinformation spread driven by content virality versus network structure? How do we account for users amplifying disinformation without subscribing to it? And what does it mean for platform governance and policy interventions when the most influential disinformation vectors might not be the ideologues but the unintentional amplifiers? These findings challenge prevailing assumptions that toxic content is siloed, revealing instead a diffuse and dynamic information ecosystem. Understanding these brokered pathways shifts the focus from simply removing bad actors to anticipating how mainstream engagement can legitimise problematic narratives.
Simon Lindgren is a Professor of Sociology at Umeå University in Sweden, where I he is also the director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary research centre studying the social dimensions of digital technology, and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Digital Social Research. His research is about politics, power, and resistance at the intersection of society and digital technologies. He uses critical discourse approaches, computational text analysis, and social network analysis to study issues relating to movements, mobilization, opinions, and identities.