Wonks and War Rooms

That's it for season 1 - thank you so much for joining us! Season 2 will kick off in January. Until then, you can head over to polcommtech.ca to join our mailing list or follow Elizabeth on Twitter @lizdubois.

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

Former content moderator, Andrew Strait, and Elizabeth chat about what content moderation is, why it is always flawed, and how the way platforms are constructed impact the flow of content. They talk about a bunch of related issues including how to (and how not to) regulate tech companies in order to minimize harms.

Additional Resources

• Andrew recommended two great books that look at content moderation and content moderators: Behind the Screen by Sarah T. Roberts and Custodians of the Internet by Tarleton Gillespie.
• After the interview Andrew also mentioned the work of Daphne Keller and Robyn Caplan.
• The German regulation mentioned in this episode is NetzDG. Here is a primer written by academics Heidi Tworek and Paddy Leerssen in April 2019, just over a year after the regulation came into effect.
• Andrew quickly mentioned "safe harbor" (in the US you might hear "Section 230"). Here is a brief explainer from Reuters.

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

Tiffany Gooch, Principal at Aurora Strategy and activist, chats with Elizabeth about issue ownership (which, it turns out, is NOT issue management). Issue ownership is this idea that certain political parties will be perceived to be particularly credible or effective on certain issues and they can develop comms strategy based on it. But pandemics change things.

Additional Resources:
A great place to start is the academic article by Bélanger and Meguid: Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice.

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

Kate Harrison (VP at Summa Strategies) and Elizabeth chat about the permanent campaign, and how political parties and politicians change their communication strategies over time. With so much information out there, politicians have to be communicating with potential voters even outside official election times.

Additional resources:
In a Policy Options piece, Esselment reviews the Canadian context: Canada’s embrace of the permanent campaign
Vasko and  Trilling have a useful academic article on the topic: A permanent campaign? Tweeting differences among members of Congress between campaign and routine periods. 

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

Nasma Ahmed is the Director of the Digital Justice Lab and she 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. 

Kevin Parent runs Ottawa Public Health's social media accounts. He and Elizabeth talk about how important authenticity is for communicating health information to the public, especially in a pandemic. Also, humour. Seriously, @OttawaHealth is hilarious on Twitter.

Additional Resources
This academic article by Gaden and Dumitrica reviews the idea of authenticity: The 'real deal': Strategic authenticity, politics and social media.
Check out Ottawa Public Health's COVID Wise website.

P.S. #Vaccineswork

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

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. 

David Coletto, pollster and CEO of Abacus Data, chats with Elizabeth about what public opinion polling is, how publics are identified, and why what "the public" thinks is politically useful. They also talk about how social media (and all the data we leave behind as we use them) are changing how we can get to know different publics. David takes a quiz to differentiate between networked publics and calculated publics (spoiler: he passes!).

Additional Resources:
In the academic journal article: Social media analysis and public opinion: The 2010 UK general election, Anstead and O'Loughlin do a great job of explaining how ideas about public opinion and how it is measured have changed over time.

Kennedy and Moss also explore the idea of publics in their academic journal article: Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency. They do a great job of connecting their work to the ideas of networked and calculated publics.

Dubois (yep, your host), Gruzd and Jacobson consider how social media data can be used to infer public opinion in this Policy Options article: Journalists should be careful when using social media posts to report what the public thinks, and should tell readers how the data was collected

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

Nick is a long-time campaigner and former Hill staffer. He and Elizabeth talk about opinion leaders and the two-step flow hypothesis. In theory these opinion leaders use social pressure and social support to influence their friends and family but Nick argues that kind of influence just isn't that useful in most federal campaigns.

Additional Resources:

• Academic journal article by Katz (he and Lazarsfeld first developed the idea): Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-to-Date Report on an Hypothesis. The article is from 1957, so it was up-to-date at some point.
• Academic journal article by Dubois (yes, as in host Elizabeth Dubois) and Gaffney: The Multiple Facets of Influence: Identifying Political Influentials and Opinion Leaders on Twitter. Pages 1261-1264 are especially relevant. They distinguish between so-called "influentials," popular accounts, and others online who are some times called opinion leaders and those people who are more locally influential which, they say, is closer to what Katz and Lazarsfeld described as an opinion leader. 
• Academic journal article by Bennett and Manheim: The One-Step Flow of Communication. In the episode Elizabeth mentions the theory developed here. 

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

Elizabeth chats with journalist Fatima Syed about gatekeeping theory. Gatekeepers control the flow of information but Fatima isn't sure if there really are gatekeepers in a digital media ecosystem. The traditional role of news media assumes journalistic ethics will guide gatekeeping decisions but that doesn't apply to social media companies which are also important information controllers. In the end, it seems like gatekeeping theory still makes sense but the idea of who can be a gatekeeper is definitely a lot broader than it used to be.


Additional resources:
Wikipedia article on gatekeeping theory (remember to follow links to original sources!)
Academic article on networked gatekeeping by Barzilai‐Nahon: Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control.

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