propagandalytics Truth in an age of truthiness: when bot-fueled PsyOps meet internet spam But when artificial amplification becomes itself artificially amplified through the presence of spammers and opportunists, the cost to power for those who game the system in just the right way can be incredibly small.
propagandalytics Psychographic profiling and Cambridge Analytica There's been a lot of talk lately about psychological or psychographic profiling based on social-media data. How does it work? (And does it work?!)
data science Build an instant Twitter dashboard, with just a little code Mining tweets? Just provide your search terms, enter a couple commands at the terminal, and voilà, ... instant dashboard!
Headed (back) west I am super-excited to announce that I will be starting next month as a Senior Research Analyst for New Knowledge.
data science When my identity is your slur — what deep learning can tell us about online political discourse It's no secret our political discourse on social media is less than civil. Deep learning helps us see just how bad it is.
academia The other side of the tenure tracks Music theorists have important, in-demand skills to offer outside of faculty jobs. Bringing those skills to those jobs is a success, not a failure.
propagandalytics Just how far did Russian propaganda go? Facebook and Twitter have changed their tune on Russian propaganda again. But is this the full extent of it?
coding Introducing the Bootstrap Starter Kit Bootstrap makes hand-coded websites not look so hand-coded. Here's all you need to get started.
propagandalytics Twitter is lying to you Twitter is resisting fixing the disinformation problem. And they're using the same propaganda and gaslighting techniques in the process.
propagandalytics 10 ways to get started fighting internet propaganda Internet propaganda is such a big problem that it can't go un-addressed. But it can be overwhelming to know how to resist it.
data science Navigating the WordPress Multisite database labyrinth Surely there's a table in the database that lists the administrators for each blog... Or so I thought.
propagandalytics The botnet cometh This morning, I woke up to several hundred notifications on Twitter. But these weren't your regular spam.
coding Converting a Jekyll blog to Ghost Some of my colleagues and I have been playing around with Ghost lately. It's a nice blogging platform -- much leaner than WordPress. And though it's more limited in what it can do
propagandalytics Something is rotten in the state of Arizona Last night, President Trump gave a speech in Phoenix that sounded a lot like his campaign speeches in 2016. Build a wall... Radical Islamic terrorism... Crooked media... But something else pernicious jumped out
propagandalytics Twitter propaganda during 'Unite the Right' As more and more people take to Twitter to keep up on fast-developing events, it's more important than ever important to understand how their platform facilitates the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and hate,
propagandalytics #MacronLeaks - how disinformation spreads A lot happened online on May 5, 2017. Ben Starling, CE Carey, and I found evidence of a massive disinformation campaign taking place on Twitter and 4chan, in an attempt to swing the
propagandalytics Trump, Russia, bots, and Breitbart: tl;dr edition I've been researching and publishing a lot lately on misinformation, disinformation, ad-tech, sockpuppets, bots, media literacy, election hacking, and the Trump administration. There's a lot there. And it's scary stuff. But in the
propagandalytics Trump's immigration language Donald Trump talks about immigration in some uniquely horrifying ways. We're all familiar with his "not sending us their best people" speech from early in his campaign. But how has his
propagandalytics Visualizing the network that connects mainstream and extremist news Online advertising plays a crucial role in the spread of misinformation. As Bill Fitzgerald wrote last week, Right now, the status quo in adtech is to sell to all sides, and profit from
propagandalytics Fake news, adtech, and the spread of misinformation The more we study extremist communities online, the more convinced we are that standard advertising practices play a significant role in the spread of misinformation. Further, while many are rightly encouraging us to
propagandalytics Trumping science The Trump administration has been drastically changing the way it communicates information with the public. One of the first pages people noticed missing from the Trump administration's website was the page on climate
propagandalytics Mining Twitter data with R, TidyText, and TAGS One of the best places to get your feet wet with text mining is Twitter data. Though not as open as it used to be for developers, the Twitter API makes it incredibly
propagandalytics (Mis)information and the Trump administration Almost immediately after the election, people started noticing pages disappearing from federal government websites. Some of this is par for the course in a new administration. Of course the Trump administration cleaned out
data science Detecting terrorism with AI Can artificial intelligence identify potential terrorist activity? This past week, BBC News published an article, "Facebook algorithms 'will identify terrorists'". It describes the content of a 5,500-word letter posted by
propagandalytics Data mining whitehouse.gov When Donald Trump became president of the United States, a lot disappeared from the administration website, whitehouse.gov. This is standard practice for a new administration, and the Obama administration's website is still