Aviv Ovadya’s work focuses on ensuring information ecosystems, and the platforms that provide them, have the proper safeguards in place to inhibit false information and prevent bad faith actors from influencing discourse.

The democratization of information sharing through ICT has had significant positive impacts, Aviv points out. By circumventing the channels of authoritarianism, access to information and its content is more democratic than ever before. The cost of rumours and disinformation, of course, is the downside of these same tools developing and becoming wildly available. Because of the way information spreads in 2018, ethnic tensions are inevitably going to be vulnerable to such tools, Aviv points out. 

One of the strange ironies of the newfound mis-and-disinformation problems being experienced in the US is that the existence of this phenomenon in the developing world is garnering attention, now that the problem is a US one as well. As academic researchers, as well as practitioners on the ground seek the best paths forward to fight disinformation in the West, rumours and falsities being used to stoke tensions in conflict-fragile states can also start receiving the pushback they need.