Civic Hacknight #487: Gray Hat Social Media – Surveilling Online Political Discourse in the Public Interest
We missed you this time around!
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.
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.
April theme: electoral interference and online disinformation
With a federal election coming up on April 28th, we've dedicated four weeks to featuring Toronto-based presenters who research and build tools to fight election interference and online disinformation. Check the complete list of upcoming events.
Agenda:
7:00-7:20 Welcome and Introductions
7:20-7:50 Presentation and Q&A/discussion
7:50-9:00 Breakout groups
Code of Conduct:
Check in with us on the Civic Tech Toronto Slack:
https://link.civictech.ca/chat
About Us:
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.
Come and be part of it!
For more info:
Platform Sponsors
Don't let broken lines of code, busted API calls, and crashes ruin your app. Join the 4M developers and 90K organizations who consider Sentry “not bad” when it comes to application monitoring. Use code “guild” for 3 free months of the team plan.
https://sentry.io
Torc is a community-first platform bringing together remote-first software engineer and developer opportunities from across the globe. Join a network that’s all about connection, collaboration, and finding your next big move — together.
Join our community today!
We missed you this time around!
Platform Sponsors
Don't let broken lines of code, busted API calls, and crashes ruin your app. Join the 4M developers and 90K organizations who consider Sentry “not bad” when it comes to application monitoring. Use code “guild” for 3 free months of the team plan.
https://sentry.io
Torc is a community-first platform bringing together remote-first software engineer and developer opportunities from across the globe. Join a network that’s all about connection, collaboration, and finding your next big move — together.
Join our community today!
Civic Hacknight #487: Gray Hat Social Media – Surveilling Online Political Discourse in the Public Interest
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.
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.
April theme: electoral interference and online disinformation
With a federal election coming up on April 28th, we've dedicated four weeks to featuring Toronto-based presenters who research and build tools to fight election interference and online disinformation. Check the complete list of upcoming events.
Agenda:
7:00-7:20 Welcome and Introductions
7:20-7:50 Presentation and Q&A/discussion
7:50-9:00 Breakout groups
Code of Conduct:
Check in with us on the Civic Tech Toronto Slack:
https://link.civictech.ca/chat
About Us:
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.
Come and be part of it!
For more info:
Get in touch!
hi@guild.host