Today in part 2 of my deeply insightful interview with author Kris Shaffer, we discuss how marketers and foreign powers have been capturing our attention and even manipulating our responses. We’ll discuss how these techniques were used in the 2016 US presidential election and in other critical voting situations. In many cases, it’s sufficient to make people stay home or to sow doubt in the election results. But we’ll also discuss whether some of these sames tools and techniques can be used to expose manipulation and tip the scales back in our favor.

Kris Shaffer, PhD (Yale University, 2011), is a data scientist and Senior Computational Disinformation Analyst for Yonder. He co-authored “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency”, a report prepared for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kris has consulted for multiple U.S. government agencies, non-profits, and universities on matters related to digital disinformation, data ethics, and digital pedagogy. Kris is the author of Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History, published July 2019 by Apress.