New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

[Uncle Joe]

66. So what is your rebuttal to University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Research Project

which the article was based on?

Philip N. Howard is a sociologist and communication researcher who studies the impact of information technologies on democracy and social inequality. He studies how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford.[1] He is the author of eight books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up.[2][3]

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Howard has been a Fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington D.C., the London School of Economics' Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research, Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. In 2013 he moved to Budapest, Hungary where he helped to found the School of Public Policy at Central European University. He has courtesy appointments or fellowships with the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University and Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

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Howard was one of the first to investigate the impact of digital media on political campaigning in advanced democracies, and he was the first political scientist to define and study "astroturf" political movements as the managed perception of grassroots support through astroturfing in his research on the Gore and Bush presidential campaigns. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (2005) is about how politicians and lobbyists in the United States use the internet to manipulate the public and violate privacy.[4] His research on technology and social change has been prescient. The subject's study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election did not identify the Russian sources of disinformation that other investigations have alluded to.[5]

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In 2014 he hypothesized that political elites in democracies would soon be using algorithms over social media to manipulate public opinion, a process he called "computational propaganda." His research on political redlining, astroturf campaigns and fake news inspired a decade of work and became particularly relevant during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.[13][14] His research has exposed the global impact of bots and trolls on public opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_N._Howard