LUMS Faculty wins FB Integrity Research Award $50000

Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) won the highly competitive Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award, which has the worth of $50,000 for their proposal. The two profound instructors, Dr Ayesha Ali, who is Assistant Professor of Economics at Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS) LUMS and Dr Ihsan Ayub Qazi, who is the Associate Professor of Computer Science at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE) have prepared their proposal “Understanding the Impact of Digital Literacy on Misinformation in Pakistan”.

The Facebook Research Awards are prepared as the unrestricted monetary awards to provide the funding for innovative and compelling research proposals and they have the potential to advance the knowledge in mutual interest area. LUMS Faculty wins Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award Worth $50,000.

During their research work, they will study growing phenomenon of misinformation on social media like Facebook and WhatsApp in Pakistan. Their work will be concentrated on relationship between digital literacy and spread of misinformation on the social media platforms. It will also help in evaluating potential solutions for combating the misinformation through the randomized control trial. The misinformation is the challenging problem in the developing countries as they have the lower levels of literacy and limited exposure of users to technology, which can exacerbate negative output of the misinformation like polarization and conflict.