Teaching and Researching Trust with Large Scale Twitter Datasets
Half Day Short Course
9:00am – 1:00pm
In a media environment where users often trust or dismiss social media content without verification, how can educators help students develop deeper information literacy skills? This half-day short course introduces TrustDefender, a new platform designed to teach digital citizenship through interactive, game-like engagement with real Twitter data. Built on the foundation of DiscoverText, a scientific research instrument used in hundreds of published studies, TrustDefender aims to make fact-checking both educational and intuitive.
Led by scholars behind the platform’s development, this workshop will explore the origins, tools, and applications of TrustDefender. Participants will engage directly with gamified labeling tasks using datasets on major political and cultural topics such as #MeToo, #BLM, QAnon, and U.S./Canadian elections. Attendees will learn how to set up and customize these tasks for classroom or research use, incorporating deductive games like “trust, don’t trust, need more info” or exploratory ones like “bot, troll, or citizen.” The course also explores how crowdsource annotation tools can build critical skills around verification, media bias awareness, and online behavior analysis.
Whether you’re researching digital trust or looking to integrate hands-on, data-driven assignments into your teaching, this course provides a flexible framework for engaging students in the complexities of the modern information ecosystem.