Disinformation campaigns are but one expression of potential digital affordances, outcomes made realizable by technology. Digital technology also allows non-state actors to discover events and trends on what FA Director Eyal Weizman calls “the threshold of detectability.” As a baseline for our discussions of disinformation, this panels highlights the knowable, the revealed, the understood made possible by technology and scientific truth claims.

The Contentious Narratives conference focuses on the effects of disinformation on peacebuilding and on efforts to document human rights abuse and war crimes. Trolls, bots — bits of computer code designed to augment social media activities — have emerged as disruptive elements in foreign and domestic politics. Soon, generative adversarial network technology — the ability to invert words and images onto video feeds, even live ones — will deepen the epistemological murk surrounding fact-based analysis and discourse.

Forensic Architecture’s Deputy Director, Christina Varvia, will be joined by panelists Malachy Browne (The New York Times), Aric Toler (Bellingcat), and Haishan Fu (Development Data Group, World Bank).