China's Influence Operations, Propaganda, and Disinformation, with Vanessa Molter

08/23/20 • 40 min

Vanessa Molter, Graduate Research Assistant at the Stanford Internet Observatory, breaks down her new report: "Telling China's Story: The Chinese Communist Party's Campaign to Shape Global Narratives."

We discuss what researchers currently know about China's influence operations on social media, how they compare with Russia's disinformation strategies, and dive into the report's three case studies: the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the 2020 Taiwanese presidential elections, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Data Science across Academia, Industry, and Progressive Campaigns, with Dr. Solomon Messing

Dr. Solomon Messing, Chief Scientist at ACRONYM and Affiliated Researcher at Georgetown University, shares his insights on data science across academia, the tech industry, and political campaigning space. We discuss how computational social science methods have changed over time, and how system architectures can be built to protect social media users' privacy. We also chat about current trends that Dr. Messing is observing at ACRONYM relating to the persuasiveness and cost of political ads on social media.

Here's the paper we discuss on differential privacy, and the Facebook URLs Dataset Codebook.

Next Episode

Data-Driven Political Campaigning in Germany, with Dr. André Haller and Simon Kruschinski

Dr. André Haller (University of Applied Sciences Kufstein Tyrol) and Simon Kruschinski (University of Mainz) share their research into data-driven political campaigning in Germany. We discuss the key political, legal, and cultural factors that influence German politicians digital campaigning, differences in organic posts versus paid advertisements, and how social media platforms have been used by fringe political actors.

Here's the research paper we discuss in the episode: Restrictions on Data-Driven Political Micro-targeting in Germany.