NEWS RELEASE
LAKE SUPERIOR STATE UNIVERSITY
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LSSU alum and international disinformation expert John-Paul Gravelines will speak on LSSU’s campus on November 19 about the challenges that democracies face today in confronting the disinformation campaigns of Russia, China, and Iran, among others.
His talk, Democracy and Disinformation in the Digital Age: One Laker's Journey into the World of Modern Psychological Warfare, will be presented at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 19 in the LSSU Library Learning Commons. It is free and open to the public.
Gravelines is a graduate of St. Basil Secondary in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He graduated from Lake Superior State University in 2007 with a major in Mathematics and a minor in Political Science. He went on to earn an MA in Political Science from the University of Missouri in 2009 and an MBA from Virginia Technological University in 2015.
Gravelines served in the Canadian Army Reserve from 2002 to 2015. He was on active duty from 2009-2011 in Kandahar, Afghanistan as a member of the Canadian Army’s Psychological Operations planning cell. He then held progressively more advanced roles with NATO’s International Security Force in Kabul and the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York.
Since 2018, Gravelines has played a leadership role in the United Kingdom’s efforts to blunt the malign global influence that Russia is having through its widespread disinformation campaigns. These efforts have spanned Kyiv to Khartoum and Tunis to Tbilisi. He is currently leading a 44- person team for the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office on behalf of the Government of Ukraine.
Gravelines lived for several years in Kyiv, Ukraine, including after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He now lives in Warsaw, Poland. He was the keynote speaker at a recent conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, and he also made a recent presentation to the Royal Military College of Canada.
The presentation Gravelines will make at LSSU will concentrate on the need for democracy to reinvent itself in the digital information age. Global adversaries of freedom, justice, and equality are using modern communication technologies to further their autocratic goals. As part of their plan to undermine the institutions and norms that govern the free world, Russia, China, Iran, and others seek to change how we all think and behave. Gravelines will discuss how democracies can fight back.
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