The Kremlin Troll Army and Ukraine’s Response to Russian Information War

Here are two recent TV appearances where I discuss the inner workings of the Kremlin’s so-called “troll army“—an organized effort to manipulate the online discourse and news agenda—as well as the odds of similar Ukrainian efforts to counteract Russia in the information war.

I joined Floriana Fossato and Ilya Klishin to talk Kremlin trolls and information manipulation with Al Jazeera English Listening Post. Here’s the full segment (not available inside the US).

I also spoke to VOA Ukrainian service during the ChasTime news show about the latest investigations of the troll headquarters and their work, as well as what Ukraine has been doing in response to the Russian efforts (video in Ukrainian).

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News Bots, Anyone?

Can automated bots be successfully used in news making and journalism work? Nicholas Diakopoulos wrote a great piece for EJO about our research on “news bots” and their implications for journalists, designers, and editors.

There are obvious economic benefits to robot journalism, but aside from writing a pile of straight news articles in finance or sports could they one day serve higher-order public interest journalism? For instance, could such robot journalists bring or enhance a critical mass of attention and public pressure to important civic issues? How are such technologies going to change the public media sphere that we inhabit?

Read the whole article at EJO: Can Robots Do Public Interest Journalism?

New Case Studies on Ukraine for Civic Media Project

The Civic Media Project from MIT Press is finally live. This is a great collection of over 100 case studies from all over the world, covering everything from open data to emerging technologies, community activism with social media and more. It is bound to be a great learning tool for students and a solid source of contextual information for scholars.

The long list of wonderful contributions includes two of my case studies, “Mapping the 2012 Election: Use of Crowdmapping in Ukraine” (Systems & Design section) and “Galas: Mobilizing & Managing Volunteer Humanitarian Efforts Online During Euromaidan Protests In Ukraine” (Community & Action section). I am very excited to be a part of such a wonderful community of civic media scholars and to join the conversation on the website. Go and read the case studies and the insightful comments and reviews available at civicmediaproject.org.