Propaganda

#168: China’s Digital Strategy for Information Control, with Dr. Andrew MacDonald

January 28, 2024 Academics

Dr. Andrew W. MacDonald, Assistant Professor of Social Science at Duke Kunshan University, shares research from his new book Directed Digital Dissidence in Autocracies: How China Wins Online. 

 

We discuss the Chinese digital and social media context, citizens’ perceptions of online propaganda, and how the state manipulates digital information to further its political interests.

 

We also discuss survey methodology, how citizens circumvent the Great Firewall, and what affect using the internet and VPNs has on trust in the state. 

#112: China’s Influence Operations, Propaganda, and Disinformation, with Vanessa Molter

August 23, 2020 Civil Society

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.

#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.

#10: Bots on Social Media and How They Impact News and Politics, with Samuel Woolley

January 18, 2017 Academics

This episode is all about bots on social media with guest Samuel Woolley, Director of Research of the Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. We discuss exactly how users make bots, and the ways they are deployed on Facebook and Twitter to influence politics through, for example, spreading fake news or disrupting protests. Sam explains how bots are difficult to trace, since they are often geotagged in misleading locations or used for digital marketing. We also talk about bots in the latest 2016 US Presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as well look forward a bit into how bots might evolve in the future.

You can follow Sam on Twitter @Samuelwoolley, and check out the Computational Propaganda Project at www.politicalbots.org.