Episodes

#36: Cloaked Facebook Pages, Hate Profiles, and Propaganda, with Johan Farkas

October 15, 2017 Academics

Johan Farkas, Lecturer and Researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, joins the show to discuss his research on “cloaked Facebook pages” that spread propaganda through false identities. We talk about how cloaked Facebook pages have been used in Denmark to spread hate speech about Muslims, how a Facebook group of activists formed to combat these accounts by reporting them to Facebook, and what Facebook’s response to the reports actually was. We also get into fake news and post-truth democracy in the age of social media, and why these terms might not best describe the current media environment.

#35: Character Assassination, Reputation Politics, and Social Media in Russia, with Sergei Samoilenko

September 18, 2017 Academics

Sergei Samoilenko, co-founder of the Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP) Research Lab at George Mason University, shares his insights on how social media is used as a tool for defamation and crisis communication. We also discuss the state of the internet and social media in Russia, bots and trolls, and the Ukranian crisis.

Check out their report: Character Assassination in Theory and Practice.

Don’t miss Tom Moylan’s review of the podcast, and please take 5 minutes for the audience survey!

#34: Participation, Social Media, and the Cyprus conflict, with Dr. Nico Carpentier

August 20, 2017 Academics

Dr. Nico Carpentier, Professor at the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, guests on the podcast this week to discuss media, participation, and conflict in Cyprus. We discuss deliberative versus participatory democracy, as well as Dr. Carpentier’s new book, “The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation”.

Please take 5 minutes to take the Audience Survey!

And while you’re at it, check out our episode on Podcast of the Day!

#33: Policing through Facebook: Social Media and Law Enforcement, with Kenneth Hampton

August 13, 2017 Civil Society

Kenneth Hampton, former Chief of Police in Tchula, Mississippi, joins the podcast to discuss his style of law enforcement, which draws heavily on the use of Facebook. Kenneth discusses how he’s used Facebook successfully to curb crime, the controversy he faced surrounding his social media use, and how important his Facebook community is to his job.

You can check out Kenneth’s Facebook pages, New Southern Justice and Tchula Police Department.

The article from the Guardian featured in the intro can be found here.

#32: Radicalization and Foreign Fighters: The Story of Lukas, with Karolina Dam

August 6, 2017 Civil Society

Karolina Dam, founder of the NGO Sons and Daughters of the World, joins the podcast this week to tell the story of her son, Lukas. Lukas is a Danish citizen who became radicalized in Copenhagen, fled to Syria, and joined ISIS. We discuss how Facebook groups are used to recruit potential terrorists, the role that social media can play in deradicalization, and the types of communication that take place between a foreign fighter and his mother.

#31: Political Talk on Social Media: Helping or Hurting Democracy?, with Dr. Scott Wright

July 30, 2017 Academics

Dr. Scott Wright, Senior Lecturer in Political Communication at the University of Melbourne, joins the pod to discuss what citizens’ everyday political talk on social media and other online forums means for democracy. D.r Wright shares findings from his research that the design of online forms, and the level of moderation on them, have a demonstrable impact on the quality of democratic debate that occurs within these online, ‘Third Spaces.’ Tune in to find out more!

#30: Gab: The Free Speech Social Network, with Utsav Sanduja

July 16, 2017 Digital Strategists

Gab is an upstart social network with over 200,000 users that does not censor its users’ content. Utsav Sanduja, Gab’s Chief Communications Officer and Global Affairs Director, joins the podcast to discuss what this social media is all about and addresses some of the recent controversies surrounding it. We discuss how Twitter and Facebook have been censoring users’ content, the role of Gab in supporting free speech online, and what Gab’s position is on bots and fake news. Utsav also talks about the choices made in developing the site’s features, what’s next for the Gab, and the social network’s ambitions to go foster a global community.

#29: Citizen Marketers and the Bernie Sanders Campaign on Social Media, with Dr. Joel Penney

July 9, 2017 Academics

Dr. Joel Penney, Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University, discusses his new book “The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age“. The book explores how everyday citizens actively assist in the promotion of political messages through their social media activity, following logics of viral marketing to enact persuasion at a peer-to-peer level. Dr. Penney shares his research on the Bernie Sanders campaign and the role that citizens played on social media, and Facebook in particular, to help the campaign get out its message through official and unofficial channels.

 

#27: Who’s Targeting You? Facebook Dark Ads in the British Election Campaign, with Sam Jeffers

June 25, 2017 Digital Strategists

In this episode, Sam Jeffers, co-founder of Who Targets Me, joins the podcast to discuss how sponsored Facebook ads were used by political parties in the 2017 British General Election. Who Targets Me is a project collecting targeted Facebook ads via a Google Chrome extension, and its aim is to shed light on who’s posting political dark ads as well as who’s being targeted. We discuss the project and what the initial data shows from GE2017.