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Today's guest hosts are Brent Cohen, Executive Director of Generation Progress, and Charlotte Hancock, Communications Director for Generation Progress.

They discuss the spread of digital disinformation\u2014and how the spread of lies and half-truths on social media platforms in particular have the potential to greatly influence our elections and the health of our democracy.
Pew Research published a report this past October that found that over half of adults in the U.S. get their news from social media \u201coften\u201d or \u201csometimes\u201d\u2014an 8% jump from the previous year. Those statistics get troubling when you consider both the amount of inaccurate or misleading information that gets circulated on social media\u2014through organic posts from individuals, ads from campaigns, and even intentional interference from other countries\u2014and the fact that this disinformation can be amplified via hyper-targeted paid advertising without much oversight at all.

To take a closer look at this problem and how we can start to solve it, Brent and Charlotte are joined by Rachel Curley, a Democracy Advocate with Public Citizen\u2019s Congress Watch division, and Michael Beckel, Research Director at Issue One.

The Twitter handle for 'Public Citizen' is @Public_Citizen, and Rachel's handle is @rachEcurley. \xa0The handle for 'Issue One' is @IssueOneReform and Michael's handle is @mjbeckel.

The website for 'Generation Progress' is www.GenProgress.org and their Twitter Handle is @GenProgress. \xa0Brent Cohen's Twitter handle is @BrentJCohen and Charlotte Hancock's handle is @CharlatAnne.

The McKay Coppins article mentioned from 'The Atlantic' about digital disinformation is titled, "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President."\xa0 Here is a link to the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/