Topic: Gray Hat Social Media – Surveying Online Political Discourse in the Public Interest

Social media has become the place where we see news and talk politics, but it is also rife with intrigue and manipulation. In this presentation, Dr Alexei Abrahams will share with you the tools and techniques being developed by public interest researchers, often operating on a shoestring budget and in a legal gray zone, to restore public oversight of this contested space.

Speaker: Alexei Abrahams

Dr Alexei Abrahams leads the digital trace project at the Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory, where he and his team continuously monitor social media to provide Canadians with a motion picture of their national political discourse, and to detect incidents of disinformation, foreign interference, hate speech, and other online harms.

Dr Abrahams is also the author of Social Media Observatory, an upcoming book at No Starch Press that teaches readers how to develop full-stack web applications in Python to scrape and analyze social media in the public interest.

Agenda:

7:00-7:20 Welcome and Introductions

7:20-7:50 Presentation and Q&A/discussion

7:50-9:00 Breakout groups

In Person: Sandford Fleming Room 3201

Online: https://link.civictech.ca/zoom

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Our weekly civic tech hacknights bring together Torontonians (designers, coders, urban planners, government staff, mappers, policy-makers, students, communications strategists, community organizers, and more) who share an interest in making Toronto more responsive, prosperous, sustainable, and equitable through design, tech, and data.

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