On Tuesday, March 14, 2023, we welcomed Dr Almog Simchon from the University of Bristol as our guest speaker at the Social Psychology Group Talk.
Dr Simchon discussed his research on social media in the age of democratic decay using natural language processing techniques.
Below you can find the abstract that Dr Simchon has shared with us:
Liberal democracies are in decline. In the current post-truth era, where outgroup animosity and disinformation contaminate our online environments, free societies cope with social fragmentation that many attribute to the rise of social media. In this talk, I will present two lines of research from a computational social science perspective, specifically leveraging natural language processing techniques. (1) Studying the online response to consequential events for democracy (e.g., terror attacks and the 2016 presidential election) and (2) exploring external and internal online threats to the democratic process (polarization, misinformation, and microtargeting). Building on psychological intervention strategies like inoculation and boosting, I will discuss possible ways to potentially curtail these threats in experimental and ecological settings.