ADR Awareness Centre

Social networks as the virtual equivalent of the ancient agora have become a preeminent space of political discourse. They can nurture new political trends and reveal existing ones.

Since the formulation of states, political authorities and political parties have sought to gauge public opinion. In recent years, opinion polls have been able to gratify this need rather efficiently.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics with the goal of “understanding” human language.

The advent of pervasive and connected digital technologies has profoundly affected both the way in which politicians interact with citizens and supporters and the way in which scholars study political communication.

External independent and unobtrusive algorithmic audits offer a fresh perspective for understanding AI-based algorithms used in social media and search engines.

The talk discusses the disinformation study undertaken by the author and commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs, published in 2020. It introduces the context of the concern for ‘fake news’ in Europe after the U.S.