Institute For The Future

Oct 11, 6-7pm: Bots, Disinformation, Computational Propaganda

A Conversation with Samuel Woolley on the Future of Computational Propaganda

Wednesday, October 11, 2017
6pm - 7pm (PST)

Join us for a conversation with Samuel Woolley, IFTF's newest Research Director, who is leading our newly formed Digital Intelligence (DigIntel) Lab. He specializes in the study of automation/AI, political communication, and information warfare. Woolley is a co-founder and the former research director of the Computational Propaganda (ComProp) research team at the University of Oxford and the University of Washington.

Woolley will speak about his research into computational propaganda, and the way that rising digital intelligence and disinformation on the internet will affect the future of governance and consumption of media across the globe.

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The past year has seen a drastic rise in concern about the use of political disinformation online. However, this phenomenon—broadly referred to as computational propaganda—has a history that stretches back to the beginnings of modern social media platforms. Samuel Woolley, Research Director of the new Digital Intelligence (DigIntel) Lab at IFTF, discusses the lessons learned from four years of research on this subject and envisions possibilities for ensuring the future of democracy both on and offline. He explores three country-specific cases where digital disinformation and government sponsored trolling have played a role in attempts to manipulate public opinion during elections and security crises: the 2016 US election, the 2016 Taiwanese General Election, and the Russia/Ukraine Crimea conflict.

Samuel Woolley, along with being the research director of the Digital Intelligence (DigIntel) Lab at IFTF, is also a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and an associate member of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. He specializes in the study of automation/AI, political communication, and information warfare. Sam is a co-founder and the former research director of the Computational Propaganda (ComProp) research team at the University of Oxford and the University of Washington. He and his collaborators have done foundational research on the topics of online disinformation and political manipulation, coining the terms ‘computational propaganda’ and ‘political bot’.

Woolley is a current research fellow on IFTF’s Future for Good project and at the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington. He is a former fellow at Google Jigsaw and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. He has published research papers with several research venues and has written commentary pieces for venues including Wired, the Atlantic, and Motherboard. For his research, he has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian and on CBS’ 60 Minutes, BBC’s News at Ten, and NPR’s On Point. His work has been presented to the US Congress, the UK Parliament, and NATO. He is a PhD candidate (ABD) at the University of Washington, holds an MA from the Claremont Graduate University, and a BA from the University of San Diego.