Digital Politics and Foreign Interventions: A Natural Language Processing Approach
Speaker: (opens in a new window)Ashrakat Elshehawy (Stanford University)
Wednesday, February 21, 14:00–14:45 (Irish time)
Please register (opens in a new window)here to receive the link and password to the online meeting and information on the room at UCD.
Abstract: Foreign entities employing targeted political messaging to influence the politics of another nation is now more straightforward and common than before. Disinformation campaigns do not solely aim to transmit deceitful political information to other countries, but they also aim to change attitudes regarding scientific findings, governance, and democratic institutions. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic and undemocratic countries. The main aim of the talk is to uncover a research agenda emphasizing ways in which foreign-owned media employ illiberal discourse abroad in democratic and undemocratic regimes, as well as its timing relative to the calendar of significant political events in the receiving countries (e.g. Elshehawy et. al 2022). The talk also focuses on providing an overview of how to retrieve and use corpora of over a million news stories of state-sponsored communication, it also provides insights on which tools of Natural Language Processing are helpful for such tasks; mainly in detecting foreign propaganda and its strategic use in affecting the domestic politics of receiving countries.
About the speaker: (opens in a new window)Ashrakat Elshehawy is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford. She was recently a visitor at Yale and before Oxford, she studied in Mannheim focusing on Advanced Quantitative Methods in Political Science.
Her research focuses on the Political Economy of Development and Foreign Influence on Domestic Political Economy. Her work evaluates the effects of foreign interventions on domestic politics, local governance, and public service provision.