Join us for the launch of the Centre for Democracy and Information Integrity at BI and discover the newest findings on democratic resilience, information integrity, and the growing influence of AI.
"The Power of Political Speech: From Persuasion to Action"
His research examines how people respond to misinformation and propaganda, why well-established scientific findings are rejected, and the tension between the architecture of the online information ecosystem and democratic discourse. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.
"Bots for Sale: The Digital Manipulation Economy"
His research covers belief formation, intergroup conflict, polarization, and underground manipulation markets, and he co-developed the award-winning inoculation games Bad News, Harmony Square, and Go Viral. He is the author of The Psychology of Misinformation and of Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian–Ukrainian War, and received the Association for Psychological Science’s Rising Star Award in 2024.
Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol
Abstract:
Democracy is in retreat around the world. Even countries that were long considered exemplary democracies are not immune against autocratization. This talk applies the lens of large-scale computational linguistic analysis to illustrate and understand those trends. Language is crucial to democracy: it permits negotiation of power relations and is used to compete in the “marketplace of ideas” to inform government policy. But language is also the tool of demagogues and autocrats to control the populace and suppress dissent. How does discourse in a democracy differ from the rhetoric of autocrats? Can the decline of a democracy be anticipated by analyzing its political discourse? Several strands of research illustrate how language mirrors the health of a democracy and how it can also be used to subvert it. The tacit conceptions of truth and honesty embodied in political speech are strong predictors of political performance and societal welfare: an analysis of U.S. Congressional speeches reveals that since the mid-1970s, rhetoric has shifted from evidence-based to intuition-based arguments, a shift accompanied by rising inequality, decreased congressional productivity, and increased polarization. Political speech can also be linked to violence: the language of political manifestos predicts whether a manifesto gave rise to political violence, and a model trained on manipulative Reddit comments can likewise predict real-world violence arising from manifestos.
Jon Roozenbeek, University of Cambridge, VU Amsterdam
Abstract:
Studies show that enormous volumes of internet traffic are driven by so-called “bad bots,” designed to trawl websites for information, scalp event tickets, spread disinformation, or scam people out of money. Underneath this sits a thriving marketplace where such bots and other types of inauthentic online activity (such as fake likes and comments on social media pages) are openly for sale. In this talk, Jon Roozenbeek discusses how this online manipulation market works, its impacts on public discourse, what predicts the price of various manipulation services, and how global governance can counteract the manipulation market’s incentive structures.