Tools, Methods, and Political Games in the Age of Musk with Stuart Shulman, PhD

Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan

Dr. Steven Hassan

Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 684 Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Elon Musk, a corporate billionaire and private naturalized American citizen born in South Africa, has taken an extraordinary amount of power in government since Donald Trump took office as President less than a month ago. Musk is seeking to interfere with elections in Germany and other countries around the world. Vance recently told European leaders to allow more “free speech” but what that means is use of social media and media to push authoritarianism. Dr. Stuart Shulman holds a PhD in American Politics and has done extensive teaching and leadership roles in collaborative interdisciplinary research. Additionally, as founder and CEO of Texifter, he discussed the analysis of Twitter data, his work supporting academic access to data, and federal agency review of public comments on proposed rules. Stuart and I discussed how Twitter was gamified through QAnon since 2017. He tracked QAnon, a tale of a high-up government official with a “Q-level” clearance covering nuclear weapons and related materials and tweeting about supposed confidential information. Coded language and “crumbs” were then created to entice signaling, and Trump often alluded to this through tweets. Stuart noted that in a December 1-12, 2017, dataset with 2.3 million mentions of Michael Flynn, “#followthewhiterabbit” and “the Great Awakening” and other QAnon buzzwords in the Tweets. Stuart noted how the Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) characters often have made-up names and emojis and could have come from anywhere in the world, including Russia, China, India, and other nations that may not have the best interests of voters and citizens in western democracies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of my podcast, cult conversations, the influence continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan.
0:16.5	And I have a colleague and friend fellow researcher of Q&on with me who's been on this previously
0:25.1	with me, Dr. Stu Shulman, who was introduced to me while I was doing my doctoral work
0:33.6	at Fielding because I wanted to know people who are experts at deep data and quantitative
0:41.9	studies and such. And I got introduced to you, Stu, and I'm still grateful to this day for knowing
0:47.8	you and learning from you. You are the founding editor of the Journal of Information, Technology, and Politics,
0:56.9	and hold a PhD in American Politics, and currently the founder and CEO of TechSifter,
1:04.5	a software business serving academic commercial and business clients.
1:09.8	And Discover Text is a web-based text analytics platform for improving human and machine learning.
1:17.8	So your past work, you are a scholar, includes extensive teaching as well as leadership roles,
1:24.2	building externally funded teams for collaborative interdisciplinary research.
1:30.1	Your projects include qualitative, as well as quantitative surveys and social media data,
1:36.7	as well as human annotation at scale, information retrieval, and machine learning methods.
1:44.3	Whoa.
1:45.3	And before we start, I want to just read the title of your most recent academic paper that you presented last year, I believe, called tools, methods, and political games in the age of Musk.
2:03.1	We may title the podcast that, because it's very timely.
2:09.1	And it was prepared for decrypting digital authoritarianism,
2:14.9	which was a conference hosted and funded by the European University Institute,
2:20.7	and that meeting took place in October of 24.
2:26.7	And all I can say is you were able with your company to go back to the first posts of Bocuon, and I've been watching
2:42.4	your little videos that you were creating, explaining how you were able to forensically, in my
2:50.3	mind, forensically, evaluate who's who and who are bots and
	...

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