Political actors around the globe use algorithms and automation to sway elections, sow confusion, and target voters with propaganda messages. Micro-targeted advertising, political bots, and manipulative junk news are just some of the tools used for political campaigns - both by mainstream political actors, as well as propagandists. Facebook has revealed that during the US elections 126 million users have seen content from the Russian Internet Research Agency; Twitter has recently announced it has removed more than 50.000 bot accounts that were related to Russian influence campaigns during the 2016 election; YouTube has become an online focal point of extremist, terrorist and propaganda content.

Was the US just the beginning of foreign influence campaigns, and are other democracies at risk as well? In this lecture Lisa-Maria Neudert from the Project on Computational Propaganda will present evidence from elections in the US, UK, Germany, and France; talk about the importance of using cutting-edge data science, and give an outlook on the challenges of developing effective countermeasures to social media manipulation. Everyone is invited; entrance is free.

Lisa-Maria’s work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and Der Spiegel. She has presented her work at the European Commission, the Council of Europe, and MisinfoCon. Lisa-Maria holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and a BA in Communication Science from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Selected as a Fulbright scholar she previously studied at the Georgetown University in Washington DC and the National University of Singapore. Follow her on Twitter: @lmneudert