Social media manipulation & the election of 2020

 How worried should we be about the impact of social media manipulation on our 2020 elections? Is the Internet Research Agency still a force? What was that Cambridge Analytica thing? How do we protect ourselves against viral misinformation? Join us for a panel discussion to get answers to your questions about the intersection of personal social media data and elections. Panelists:

 Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Professor of Political Science and Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan, is a member of Michigan’s Election Security Task Force.  His current research concerns Election Forensics, which develops statistical and computational tools to verify the accuracy of election results.  His work includes analysis of U.S. presidential elections and many other elections.  He has developed Bayesian models to detect frauds and a Twitter Election Observatory to monitor American elections.

 Dr. Mark Ackerman is is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and a Professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His major research area is social computing, investigating online knowledge communities, expertise sharing, and most recently, misinformation.  Mark is a member of the CHI Academy (HCI Fellow) and an ACM Fellow.  Mark has degrees from the University of Chicago, Ohio State, and MIT. His major research area is social computing, investigating online knowledge communities, expertise sharing, and most recently, misinformation.

 Come at 7 pm for food, drinks and socializing. Program begins at 7:30 pm.   

This event is open to the public (but must be over 21 to buy/drink alcohol.)

Speakers hosted at B&V are community members informing us about their work and various topics important to democracy