Breaking the News: How Bots, Trolls and Other Media Manipulators Threaten Our Politics

Mike Ananny is an Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. He is the author most recently of Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear (The MIT Press), and the report The Partnership Press: Lessons for Platform-Publisher Collaborations as Facebook and News Outlets Team to Fight Misinformation (Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University.)

Elizabeth Dubois is an Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Ottawa. She examines how digital media are used for political purposes and how people develop political opinions. Her recent work has focused on political bots and on echo chambers, including her recently published article “The Echo Chamber is Overstated” (Journal of Information, Communication & Society). She is a Fellow with the Public Policy Forum and Principal Investigator and Co-Chair of the Connected Canada Conference. Find her on Twitter @lizdubois or at www.elizabethdubois.ca.

Brittan Heller is the Director of Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League. She is the founder of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society, which pursues a initiatives such as the Online Hate Index to combat hate and stigma on the internet.

David Salvo is a resident fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund for the United States, where he focuses on Russian information operations in the US and Baltic region. He was previously a Foreign Service Officer at the US State Department.

Chris Tenove, the moderator, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He researches digital media, democracy and international human rights, and recently published Digital Threats to Democratic Elections: How Foreign Actors Use Digital Techniques to Undermine Democracy (Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, UBC).