Date: April 01, 2025
Topic: Gray Hat Social Media – Surveilling 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.
https://nostarch.com/social-media-observatory, https://www.cdmrn.ca/digitaltrace
Speakers:
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.