Maria Elizabeth Grabe will focus on misinformation and disinformation as COM’s new Dalton Professor and chair of Emerging Media Studies.

New Appointment

COM’s New Dalton Family Professor Knows Disinformation from Personal Experience

Maria Elizabeth Grabe battled South African censorship under apartheid

Working for South Africa’s state-controlled TV under apartheid, documentarian Maria Elizabeth Grabe faced unrelenting censorship. One producer would close his eyes while listening for anti-government criticism in her films, so Grabe learned to shoot unflattering views of officials and to use other visual cues that the man would miss during his shut-eyed sessions. She stayed late at the studio, handing in work just before airtime to head off edits. 

After police raided her cubicle in search of subversive footage, she quit and enrolled at Baylor University in Texas, where she earned a master’s in international journalism in 1992 and finally breathed the air of a free press. After earning a doctorate from Temple, that freedom became a theme of her subsequent career as a leading communication scholar at Indiana University. 

On January 1, Grabe joined the College of Communication as its inaugural Dalton Family Professor and second-ever director of Emerging Media Studies.

“This position is a match for both the research and teaching I love doing and my accumulated experience as an academic and former journalist,” Grabe says. “Academic settings generally do not allow for nimble undertakings in response to pressing social issues. The Emerging Media program in the College of Communication is a noteworthy exception, and the Dalton Professorship exemplifies that BU and its supporters recognize the importance of a university serving the greater good.”

The Dalton family, including BU trustee Nathaniel Dalton (LAW’91), endowed the professorship. Dalton was cofounder and longtime president of the global investment firm Affiliated Managers Group. He is a cofounder and CEO of Sora Union, a company that provides full-time work to people who have been displaced or are at risk of displacement, primarily from conflict or climate change. 

“The [Dalton Family] Professorship,” says COM Dean Mariette DiChristina (COM’86), “aims to focus on the use of emerging communication platforms and research to engage communities around addressing societal challenges—building understanding while building bridges.”

Among Grabe’s work is the creation of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, which brings together journalists and data scientists to study media and technology and to counter disinformation. She is an International Communication Association fellow as well as editor of the journal Communication Theory. “She has significant experience on externally funded research,” DiChristina says, and “she brings a global perspective and has a strong record of mentoring graduate and doctoral students, as well as administrative experience.”

Grabe inaugurates the professorship as misinformation and disinformation on social media threaten to flood another US election. 

“I cannot think of a more acute threat to the democratic way of life than doubt about the integrity of information that flows through media platforms,” Grabe says. “A growing list of occurrences link false information to public opinion trends or offline behavior that have life-threatening consequences for citizens and democracies alike. At the same time, the circulation of exaggeration and lies is not a new phenomenon… But the volume, velocity, and variety of contemporary disinformation makes an infodemic diagnosis a reasonable one.”

She sees “an inevitable collision course” between curbing disinformation and freedom of expression, and she dismisses calls for regulatory oversight of media as “smokescreens to avoid platform self-regulation. The First Amendment protects citizens against the government, which makes state censorship the only action that would violate its terms.”

By contrast, social media platforms—“despite Mark Zuckerberg’s aversion to using a blue pencil and Elon Musk’s self-exaltation in destroying gatekeeping”—have the constitutional right, if not the will, to restrict their content, she says. “Too often, the responsibility for navigating polluted information environments is pushed to the populace, who are the casualties of disinformation… The typical social media user is simply ill-equipped to evaluate the accuracy of news or news-like content.”

Dalton says his family created the professorship because “our ability to address both national and global challenges is being impeded by the use of emerging communication platforms to manipulate and divide people, rather than bring them together to common understanding of facts and analysis. In a sense, progress in these areas would provide a multiplier effect across a range of important challenges facing the country and globe.

“In conversations with Dean DiChristina and others, we came to the view that Boston University is extremely well positioned to lead in addressing these challenges through scholarship and education.”