In this episode of the ACIT Science Podcast, we are talking with Marcel Schliebs, who is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Political Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, working in the context of the Computational Propaganda Project.

We are discussing the influence of foreign actors in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US and the spread of misinformation around the current Covid crisis. We talk about the rise of computational propaganda, which actors are involved, who is targeted (from the Western liberal democracies to the respective regime's political opponents), and what incentives bad actors might have for spreading fake news.

We talk about how technologies have transformed the ease with which misinformation is sown, how deep fake media might exacerbate the problem in the near future, and what steps the big tech companies, intelligence agencies, and governments can take and are taking against this.

We talk about the challenges of a data-driven approach to inferring causalities in the complex landscape of computational propaganda, and about

Marcel's future research topics.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.