Digital Trust and Security Seminar Series: Dr Chester & Dr Lane

Talk Title: Automated Data Collection from Politically Restricted Social Media Platforms: Challenges and insights from China and Russia

Join us for a webinar to learn about the automated web-scraping techniques developed by Dr. Patrick Chester (Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey) and Dr. Justin E. Lane (CulturePulse, Bratislava, Slovakia) for extracting content from Russian and Chinese social media platforms. Dr Chester’s recent paper (‘Divide to Conquer: Using Wedge Narratives To Influence Diaspora Communities’, co-written with Dr Audrye Wong at the University of Southern California) is one of the first efforts to successfully retrieve and analyse the full text of WeChat subscription account posts at a large scale. Dr Justin Lane has developed an AI system to access and retrieve content from Russian social media platforms, such as VK and Telegram, as well as from social media platforms in other tightly restricted contexts. He has worked extensively with NGOs and governments that have used his technology to counter and monitor the spread of disinformation.

Speaker Biographies:

Patrick Chester is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Stevens Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from New York University’s Politics Department and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at UC, San Diego. In his research, he uses word embeddings, large language models, and other computational methods to explore how and why media actors in authoritarian regimes disseminate disinformation and propaganda. Additionally, he has helped bring tools from the data science community to a broader audience by developing tools for, such as generating keywords with the keyclust R package. His research appears in journals such as Conflict Studies and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law.

Dr Lane is the CEO of the US-Slovak AI company, CulturePulse. He holds a doctorate in cognitive anthropology from the University of Oxford and has authored over 100 academic papers, conferences, and lectures. His book, Understanding Religion through Artificial Intelligence, explores how AI can be used to study culture and complex social behaviour. CulturePulse has worked with organisations such as the UN, to create digital twins of social systems to address real-world threats to social cohesion. More information on this work can be found here.

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The Centre for Digital Trust and Society organises the DTS Guest Seminar Series and is a focal point for research across the University of Manchester that explores aspects of trust and security in our digital world. The Centre is part of Digital Futures, a highly interdisciplinary network which operates across the whole range of the University of Manchester's digital research.

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