When Christopher Wylie first began working for the British behavioral research company SCL Group, the company used data drawn from a number of sources as a means of potentially altering outcomes for their, sometimes military, clients. But over time, Wylie’s mission — and that of the company — expanded. Conservative […] Read more »
The Global Disinformation Order
Although propaganda has always been a part of political discourse, the deep and wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raise critical public interest concerns. Cyber troops’ are defined as government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online (Bradshaw and Howard 2017a). We comparatively examine the formal organization of […] Read more »
Don’t just poll – research!
Political practitioners too often see polls and focus groups as the automatic choices for political research. Polling tells you about aggregate attitudes. Strategic reliance on polling grew with dependence on television – a medium that used to reach most everyone and so aggregate attitudes and message receptivity made sense. In […] Read more »
Here’s how The Washington Post’s new computational journalism lab will tackle 2020
Hold onto your robots: The future of journalism is exceedingly computational. (At least part of it.) And the 2020 U.S. election is a great place to start. … The engineering-heavy Washington Post newsroom has used bots, automation, and large-scale data in its reporting before, perhaps notably with its Heliograf tool […] Read more »
The Washington Post establishes a computational political journalism R&D lab
The Washington Post’s newly launched elections engineering team will establish a computational political journalism R&D lab in the newsroom this fall. Under the leadership of Jeremy Bowers, the team will collaborate with Nick Diakopoulos, an assistant professor in communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University, to experiment with algorithmic […] Read more »
Data shows Twitter primary differs from the ‘real world’
As voters and activists try to make sense of the enormous Democratic primary field, Twitter, where real-time “analysis” flows 24-7, has emerged as a go-to news portal. But the narrative that is emerging there may be missing the larger story of the 2020 campaign, at least up to now. CONT. […] Read more »