“Digital Threats to Democracy: Comparative Lessons and Possible Remedies” was a two-day research workshop that brought together both emerging and senior scholars to present comparative research on the impact of digital media on democratic processes and institutions, including topics such as dis- and misinformation, propaganda, and political polarization. The workshop was held June 13-14 at the Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn, New York.

The workshop was organized in partnership with the International Journal of Press/Politics. Participants in the workshop were invited to submit their work for a special issue in IJPP, an open call for which is now available here (deadline: September 1, 2019).

The original call for proposals for the June workshop  may be found here.

Faculty Chair:

Cristian Vaccari
Reader in Political Communication, Loughborough University
Editor-in-Chief, the International Journal of Press/Politics

Presentations:

Shelley Boulianne
Associate Professor, MacEwan University
Problems of Democracy or Problems of Disposition? The Role of Personality and Ideology in Political Talk and Like-Minded Discussion

Erik Bucy
Professor, Texas Tech University
Building Societal Resilience to Digital Disinformation

Cody Buntain
Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University
Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube During the 2016 US Presidential Election

Jessica Collier
PhD Candidate, University of Texas, Austin
Exposure to Fact-Checks on Facebook: Field Experiments in Four Continents

Edda Humprecht
Senior Research and Teaching Associate, University of Zurich (IKMZ)
Resilience to Online Disinformation: A Framework for Cross-National Comparative Research

Eleonora Kirkizh
PhD Candidate, GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences
Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to News

Ozan Kuru
Postdoctoral Fellow in Science of Science Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Understanding Political Informational Processing in WhatsApp Groups: A Comparative Study of User Perceptions and Practices in Turkey, Singapore, and the USA

Gordon Ramsay
Senior Research Fellow, University of Westminster
Russian Needles in Western Media Haystacks: Propaganda Detection through Text Matching in British and U.S. Media

Chris Tenove
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of British Columbia
Disinformation as a Democratic Threat: Conceptual Models and Policy Approaches

Shawn Walker
Assistant Professor, Arizona State University
The IMPED Model of Misinformation

Jenifer Whitten-Woodring
Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Lessons from Myanmar’s Facebook-Driven Communal Violence: The Divisive Potential of Social Media in an Intolerant Society

Magdalena Wojcieszak
Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
and Andreu Casas
Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University
Detecting Long-term Media Effects on Affective Polarization: Evidence from Web-tracking and Longitudinal Surveys in Three Countries Guests

Other Guests:

David Karpf
Associate Professor, the George Washington University

Baird Howland
Data Scientist, Harmony Labs