Arguing on the internet: Disagreement, knowledge and epistemic justice in online infrastructures

On any given day, millions of people are debating important topics on the internet. Is Donald Trump lying again? Will a political party’s climate policy achieve real change? What is the best way to deal with rising immigration? 

The internet is home to virulent debate, arguments and conflict. It is also where knowledge is shared in the form of informational resources and where people learn as a result of exchanges with others and with those resources. Disagreement is inevitable and vital. It can spur knowledge creation as people try to correct inaccuracies or position themselves in relation to alternative opinions. But it can also be corrupted by those who take advantage of platform infrastructures to further undemocratic agendas. 

This workshop aims to explore these tensions to ask: 

• When can disagreement be knowledge producing? 

• How do platform infrastructures and digital technologies serve or hamper productive disagreement? 

• What do current forms of online disagreement mean for democratic decision-making and contestation?

• How do we protect knowledge-building disagreement from infiltration by actors who undermine democratic legitimacy?

• What are the features of ideal environments for supporting productive disagreement? How might these features differ according to different (geographical, social, political etc) contexts? 

The workshop is organised by Dr Heather Ford and Dr Francesca Sidoti from the wikihistories project which is exploring how Wikipedia editors resolve disagreement in order to arrive at consensus and what this means for systems that use Wikipedia data.