Policy Punchline

What can we learn about all the misinformation about Covid-19? Are they mostly incorrect but uncorrelated health tips, or are there specific narratives behind those misinformation that seek to lay groundwork for the post-pandemic public discourse? Are they simply "fake news" spread around by well-meaning citizens, or perpetrated by state actors and organizations?... In this episode, Prof. Jacob Shapiro, Director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, discusses what his team and Microsoft have been learning about all the Covid-19 related fake news on the Internet. Meanwhile, in a recent op-ed titled "Coronavirus: Don't forget about the poor kids," Prof. Shapiro addresses some of the most urgent education policy questions during the pandemic, the debates around fairness of digital learning, and how we need to focus on the real problems in this crisis and look ahead for groundbreaking policy solutions. We also touch on topics from bioterrorism (how unlikely it is to design Covid in a lab) to impacts o