How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President

Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the NULab at Northeastern University.

In this lecture, Kathleen Hall Jamieson will marshal the troll posts, unique polling data, analyses of how the press used the hacked content, and a synthesis of half a century of media effects research to argue that, although not certain, it is probable that the Russians helped elect the 45^th president of the United States.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the Walter and Leonore Director of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands.

Five of the 15 books that Jamieson has authored or co-authored have received a total of eight political science or communication book awards (Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism, Presidents Creating the Presidency, and The Obama Victory.) She recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication and The Oxford Handbook on Political Communication. Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught and has delivered the American Political Science Association’s Ithiel de Sola Poole Lecture, the National Communication Association’s Arnold Lecture, and the NASEM Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education Henry and Bryna David Lecture. Her paper “Implications of the Demise of ‘Fact’ in Political Discourse” received the American Philosophical Society’s 2016 Henry Allen Moe Prize. Jamieson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association, and a past president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.