Speakter: Christian Grimme, Mike Preuss

Title: Propaganda and Social Media: Actors, Trends, and Consequences

Abstract:

The German general election of September 2017 has amplified the interest of German media and public in possible consequences of social bot usage in social networks. Did something happen, actually? We show some interesting actions detected during our social network monitoring and use that as starting point to characterize what the status of automation in social media is. What is the impact of the new phenomena, how can we detect them, and what are possible countermeasures? And, what is the role of artificial intelligence / machine learning in all this? Based on current trends, we speculate about the near future of propaganda in social media, and about the role of research in this context.

Bios:

Christian and Mike are PostDoc Researcher at ERCIS and the Information Systems and Statistics chair at the University of Muenster. Both received their PhDs in computer science at TU Dortmund. Currently, they are part of the BMBF-funded project PropStop, which deals with identification and analysis of automated propaganda in online media. Mike’s research interests focus on the field of evolutionary algorithms for real-valued problems, namely on multimodal and multi- objective optimization, and on computational intelligence methods for games. Christian is principal investigator of the PropStop consortium and focuses on data analytics, combinatorial multi-objective optimization, and scheduling theory in research.