DeLTA Seminar by Konstantin Todorov
When Science Goes Viral: Informal Online Debate, Disinformation, and the Role of AI
ABSTRACT
Scientific claims and informal discussions about science-related issues have proliferated across online platforms, where they are increasingly mobilized within manipulative narratives and disinformation campaigns. How, why, and when do people invoke science in online debates; what intended or unintended effects do these practices produce?
In this talk, I consider these questions through the lens of how scientific discourse is used—or instrumentalized—to legitimize misleading information and to insert potentially harmful narratives in social media. I then explore how artificial intelligence, and in particular transformer-based language models, can contribute to identifying and countering such dynamics, rather than amplifying them.
I conclude by turning to the role of emotions and affective language in scientific disinformation, and by discussing the challenges that emotionally charged discourse poses for current state-of-the-art models
BIOGRAPHY
Konstantin is an associate professor at the University of Montpellier (maître de conférences HDR, hors classe) and a researcher at the LIRMM laboratory within the ADVANSE team. At LIRMM, he is co-leading the AI and Data Science transversal axis. I’m also the lab’s European correspondent. He received his habilitation in 2020.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Centrale Paris (France) between 2009 and 2012, after receiving a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrueck (Germanu) in 2010. Several years before that, he obtained MSc (or DEA as they used to call it in France) in Applied Mathematics (option Machine Learning) from the University of Provence in Marseille.
Konstantin's research activities focus on Artificial Intelligence, with a particular interest in knowledge graphs, NLP, machine learning for graphs and language, knowledge and information extraction. He explore these topics across a variety of application domains, including journalism, biology, immunogenetics, and cultural heritage. Some of the keywords that charactirize his research are interdisplinarity (via collaborations with the social sciences, media & cultural institutions), societal cohesion (e.g. via fighting disinformation), public health (e.g. via supporting vaccine research), open and inclusive science.
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