Adi, a lawyer and campaigner, explains how campaigns are often thinking about how they can crack into people's filter bubbles in order to raise awareness and find new supporters. During the  conversation Elizabeth and Adi tease apart the difference between algorithmically driven filter bubbles and echo chambers which come about as a result of individuals choices in their media environment.

Additional Resources:

• Eli Pariser has a helpful Ted Talk about his notion of the Filter Bubble: Beware online “filter bubbles”.
• This academic article by Dubois (yes, your host) and Blank breaks down the theory of echo chambers and talks about how people's media diets might help them avoid echo chambers: The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.
• This Knight Foundation report is a great, accessible, overview of academic research related to echo chambers: Avoiding the Echo Chamber about Echo Chambers.
• Early in the episode Elizabeth mentions homophily which is basically the idea of "birds of a feather flock together." The Wikipedia article on homophily is a great place to start.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Journalists Facing Mean Tweets: What It Means for Our Democracy - Join us Tuesday, March 22 at noon ET for a live virtual event! Register here.

In this special live recording of the podcast, Elizabeth will chat with Rosemary Barton, chief political correspondent for CBC, Fatima Syed, host of The Backbench podcast (Canadaland) and vice-president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and Mark Blackburn, online producer for APTN.

They will talk about increasingly toxic online spaces and tackle tricky questions: What can we do to cultivate civic engagement between individuals and news media? What counts as incivility and who is a troll? How can we encourage broad civic engagement while discouraging harassment? How do we create safer environments for journalists?

Learn more here and don't forget to register early.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Sean Speer is the Editor-At-Large at The Hub, a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and previously served as Senior Advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He and Elizabeth chat about political polarization and dig into the different theories of polarization including elite polarization and mass polarization, as well as ideological versus affective polarization. They discuss the idea of politics as a left-to-right spectrum, polarization causing artificial divides, the rise of populism, and the idea that polarization can be used as a tool for meaningful progress.

Additional Resources

• Interested in learning more about political polarization from an academic perspective? This systematic review by Kubin & von Sikorski is a good place to start.
• Elizabeth mentions two past episodes of Wonks and War Rooms: this episode about issue ownership with Tiffany Gooch and this episode about the high-choice media environment with Jane Lytvynenko.
• Sean speaks about how Canadian campaign finance regimes might contribute to political polarization. This article gives a brief overview of how political parties are financed in Canada.  
• Sean and Elizabeth spend some time discussing the link between populism and polarization. This video shows what the rise of modern populism is all about.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Shuvaloy Majumdar is the Foreign Policy Director and Munk Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and this week he and Elizabeth tackle propaganda, government communication and mis/disinformation. They discuss the blurry line between government messaging and propaganda, and what they can look like in authoritarian versus democratic regimes. Shuvaloy also speaks to his experiences of government communications as a former policy director to foreign ministers.

Additional Resources 

• Elizabeth draws on this article by Aaron Hyzen for her definition of propaganda.
• Elizabeth mentions this episode from season one about the high choice media environment with Jane Lytvynenko 
• In this episode, which was recorded in early February, Shuvloy uses examples of propaganda from the Russian government. This CBC article discusses some examples of how disinformation and propaganda are being used in the context of the current invasion of Ukraine.
• Elizabeth discusses the concept of computational propaganda towards the end of the episode. This article from Woolley and Howard tackles how political communication is impacted by algorithms and automation.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Claire Wardle is a professor at Brown University and the co-founder of First Draft, a non-profit that focuses on misinformation and the tools needed to fight it. She and Elizabeth chat about information disorder, a term Claire helped coin. The term helps us think about issues related to mis- and dis- information as bigger than being about fact or not. Claire explains how it is actually much more important to think about the information environments people find themselves in, how they might be different from other people’s information environments, and how things like emotion and sense of community come into play.  They also talk about the idea of inoculation against mis- and dis-information.

Additional resources:

• Claire and her colleague Hossein Derakhshan coined the term ‘information disorder’ in this 2017 report where they break down different types, phases and elements of mis- and disinformation.
  
  
• The hypodermic needle theory also comes up, which is an early idea about how media messages affect audiences. This video primer explains what it is (and why it definitely  isn’t accepted anymore).
   
• Claire reminds us that humans are hardwired “to be really bad at this stuff” and talks about the role that emotions play in spreading mis- and disinformation. Claire explains the connection in this First Draft video.
   
• This article by Linda Monsees looks more closely at the emotional reasons that people share mis/disinformation, and some of the weaknesses of relying only on media literacy as a solution.
   
• Elizabeth brings up the idea of inoculation theory as a promising way to deal with mis/disinformation, and Claire introduces the notion of pre-bunking. This First Draft guide explains what pre-bunking is and how it can help fight mis/disinformation.
   
• At the end of the show, Claire also brings up algorithmic amplification, which sometimes gets lost in the mix of conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’ – this CJR post includes examples and a bunch of resources to learn more.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

To kick-off our season on mis- and dis- info we are rebroadcasting this great conversation with Nasma Ahmed who is the Director of the Digital Justice Lab. In this episode, recorded in 2019, Nasma helps Elizabeth unpack what exactly mis- and dis- information are, why we need to question content we see online, and how a lack of trust in larger political systems plays in. 

Additional Resources:

• First Draft has a number of very useful resources. Find some key definitions in Wardel's Fake news: It's complicated and check out this three part series on The Psychology of Misinformation.
• Marwick and Lewis with Data & Society also have a helpful report: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

This season of Wonks and War Rooms is going to focus on mis- and dis- information. We'll talk about information disorder, political polarization, post-truth politics, and more! Tune in to hear from political strategists, journalists, public policy folks, and academics.

Get caught up on past episodes and find fully annotated transcripts in English and French at https://www.polcommtech.com/. 

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

This week Elizabeth wraps up season 3! This season was focused on Media and Digital Literacy, and Elizabeth runs through all the concepts we covered to help you gain a greater understanding of how these concepts are interrelated. Elizabeth also takes a look back at some concepts and episodes from previous seasons, and looks to the future for our next season on mis and dis-information.

Additional Resources: 

• Remember Season 3, Episode 1 with Matthew from Media Smarts? This excellent resource from Media Smarts provides an overview of digital literacy fundamentals.
• Check out this report to understand more about the Digital Media Ecosystem.
• Elizabeth mentions this video on hybridity.
• Many of the theories discussed on the show are media effects theories. Check out this article that gives an overview of media effects theories.
• Curious about any of the other theories or episodes mentioned? You can find all Wonks and War Rooms episodes here.

Do you have guest ideas? Political communication theories you need explained? Any other feedback for the show? Make sure to reach out to @polcommtech on Twitter and Instagram or @lizdubois on Twitter.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

Elizabeth chats with public policy expert Vass Bednar about surveillance capitalism. Taking a few Canadian examples, they talk about how tech companies collect and use data about their users, how privacy policy might be a red herring and how incentive structures in the tech industry contribute to the system of surveillance capitalism.

Additional Resources:

• Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the key text. There are also a lot of summaries of the book in blog posts, podcasts, and videos. One of my favourite short reviews of the concept comes from the Fortune Magazine YouTube channel, found here.
• Check out Vass's newsletter, Regs to Riches - of particular interest to this conversation are her pieces on Laying down the Loblaw and Loblaw media.
• Vass also wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail: Loblaw’s points economy for private-health data follows Big Tech’s playbook.
• In the episode Vass mentioned a weather app - check out The Weather Network's description of their "precise location forecast" which includes information about user privacy.
• Vass also mentions that Facebook offers information about why you might see certain ads. Find out more here.
• Not sure what the bread memories of 2017 Elizabeth is talking about? Here’s the wiki.
• Also, wondering about GDPR? It’s Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May 2018. Find out more.
• Vass mentions the Shopify breakup with Mail Chimp, which happened in November 2019. Since this episode originally aired, the two have gotten back together.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

This week Elizabeth chats about technological affordances with Rachel Aiello, an online politics producer for CTVNews.ca and a member of the parliamentary press gallery. They chat about how technology is changing how journalists report and how audiences receive information, from politicians on social media to journalists working from their phones. They also talk about technological determinism in order to highlight why it is important we think about affordances in the first place.

Additional Resources

Elizabeth uses this article by Butcher & Helmond and this article by Nagy & Neff to build her definitions of the different types of affordances she discusses in this episode.

Rachel discusses how phones have become a key tool for journalism, check out the Mobile Journalism Manual to learn more.

Elizabeth mentions Authenticity with Kevin Parent from Season 1, Episode 7.

Rachel and Elizabeth talk about the changes to the news cycle and how news is consumed. This study from Verizon shows how often people watch videos on mute.

 Elizabeth also discusses technological determinism. Here is an overview of the theory.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.