Deen Freelon on Why Black Trolls Matter
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2020
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Deen’s work focuses on data science and political expression on social media, and they discussed research he conducted on tweets from the Internet Research Agency troll farm and their attempts to influence U.S. politics, including around the 2016 election. In a recent article, Deen and his coauthors found that IRA tweets from accounts presenting themselves as Black Americans received particularly high engagement from other users on Twitter—which raises interesting questions about the interaction of race and disinformation. They also talked about what the data show on whether the IRA actually succeeded in changing political beliefs and just how many reporters quoted IRA trolls in their news reports without realizing it.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:55.6 | The paper basically shows that if you analyze what we call the black presenting tweets |
| 1:24.4 | that the IRA published on a per-tweet basis, that those tweets were able to pull in more |
| 1:31.2 | reactions, that is more retweets, more replies and more likes, than tweets of other assumed |
| 1:37.9 | identities that the IRA sort of took on. |
| 1:42.4 | And so that is sort of a bit of a hidden finding because if you look at the overall numbers, |
| 1:48.1 | accounts that were classified as conservative actually got more total reactions, but that's |
| 1:55.0 | only because the volume of tweets by conservative presenting accounts was that much higher. |
| 2:01.7 | I'm Quinted Gerritic and this is the LawFair podcast, May 21st, 2020. |
| 2:10.4 | This week on our Arbiters of Truth Series on Disinformation, a friend to whack and I spoke |
| 2:15.1 | with Dean Freeland, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Hussman |
| 2:20.3 | School of Journalism and Media. |
| 2:22.8 | Dean's work focuses on data science and political expression on social media, and we discussed |
| 2:28.2 | research he conducted on tweets from the Internet Research Agency troll farm, and there |
| 2:32.7 | attempts to influence US politics, including around the 2016 election. |
| 2:37.4 | In a recent article, Dean and his co-authors found that IRA tweets from accounts presenting |
| 2:42.2 | themselves as black Americans received particularly high engagement from other users |
| 2:47.0 | on Twitter, which raises interesting questions about the interaction of race and disinformation. |
... |
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