Since 2014, there have been at least 74 nation-state led online influence campaigns targeting other countries through deceptive social media, with 21 of those in 2019 alone.

In this next OSCAR seminar, Professor Jacob Shapiro looks at how the organizational structures of different foreign influence efforts are reflected in their content. Using topic models estimated on a corpus of 43M tweets from authentic users, he shows that troll campaign management practices leave a clear signal in terms of topical choices, changes over time, and movement between different discussions. These patterns reveal several novel approaches for understanding top-down management in online discussions.

Speaker Biography

Jacob N. Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that compiles and analyzes micro-level data on politically motivated violence in countries around the world. His research covers conflict, economic development, misinformation, and security policy. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations and co-author of Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict. His research has been published in broad range of academic and policy journals as well as a number of edited volumes. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan.

When: 12pm-1pm, 23rd February 2021

Where: This event will be held on Zoom. To register, follow this link. Once you have registered, you will be sent the link and passcode to access the call.

Contact: [email protected]