Brad Badertscher speaks on combatting disinformation at Cambridge Summit

The University of Notre Dame’s Brad Badertscher, the Deloitte & Touche Professor of Accountancy and chair of the Department of Accountancy at the Mendoza College of Business, was invited to serve on the advisory board of the University of Cambridge’s Disinformation Summit. Hosted at King’s College at the end of July 2023, the summit convened global thought leaders from psychology, journalism, financial reporting, political science and related information science fields. The two-day event explored four main themes: the societal impact of strategic disinformation, methods used to disseminate disinformation, the psychology of entrenched belief systems and the means to mitigate disinformation efficacy. Additionally, Badertscher presented on the panel “Combatting Disinformation: Counterprogramming, Inoculation, Education, and Community.” The panel focused on mitigation of disinformation, discussing the efficacy and promise of methods currently employed to minimize the societal impact of disinformation. Badertscher was one of six people selected to speak on the topic, along with experts from the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency at the National Cyber Security Centre, the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge. At Notre Dame, Badertscher researches financial accounting issues, focusing on financial report quality. In recent papers, he examined fair value accounting, tax aggressiveness and private firm accounting. Badertscher is also a former editor at The Accounting Review and teaches an MBA class on corporate financial reporting and an accounting research class at the Mendoza College of Business.