Emma L Briant - The Woman Exposing the Propaganda Puppet Masters - Leading Expert on Information War

The Putin regime has been widely exploiting the vulnerabilities of global social media platforms, using bots and trolls to promote specific stories and narratives. But they are not alone once developed the same techniques can be used by other powers, international and local to subvert democratic institutions and to warp public perception of the news and politics in their countries. But Russian propaganda does not work how most people think it does. The interventions of the trolls and agitators often fail to directly promote pro-regime narratives in political discussions but do succeed in distracting people from having open discussions that are critical of the state. The mechanics of disinformation operations are often counter-intuitive – and we’ll unpack this topic in today’s episode. ---------- SPEAKER: Emma L Briant is an internationally recognized expert and scholar of information warfare and propaganda who helps policy makers, governments, business leaders, journalists and the general public understand and respond to the challenge of contemporary online threats. Emma is a fellow of Bard College. She has been called “The woman exposing the propaganda puppet masters” by Index on Censorship in 2022, and “One of the world's leading experts in information wars.” by Der Spiegel in 2023. Her research and solutions on the rapid evolution of surveillance driven propaganda and its implications for democracy were central in exposing the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Her work continues to inform policy including through US Congress, UK Parliament, Canadian Parliament and the European Parliament. ---------- BOOKS: Propaganda and counterterrorism: Strategies for global change (2015) Bad News for Refugees by Greg Philo, Emma Briant, et al. (2013) ---------- LINKS: Emma Briant blog and website: https://emma-briant.co.uk/ Emma Briant on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Briant Emma Briant on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmmaLBriant Emma Briant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalbriant/ Emma Briant on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/emmalbriant Emma Briant at Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/es/author/emma-l-briant/ Emma Briant at Bard College: https://www.bard.edu/faculty/details/?id=4601 Reading list: https://www.patreon.com/posts/78981573 About Cambridge Analytica: https://www.propagandamachine.tech/ UK Parliamentary committee report: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/96662/html/ ----------