Speaker:

Yingdan Lu, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

Title:

The Evolution of Authoritarian Propaganda in the Digital Age

Abstract:

How can authoritarian governments capture public attention in the digital era? This research talk explores the transformed landscape of information control in authoritarian regimes, which face the dual challenges of audience fragmentation across diverse media channels and heightened competition with non-governmental actors for public attention. In this talk, I will present two fundamental shifts that illustrate the evolution of authoritarian propaganda in the digital age. First, I theorize a decentralized model for producing and disseminating propaganda on social media and identify evidence of this model in China through a computational analysis of nearly five million videos from Douyin (Chinese TikTok). Second, I discuss how authoritarian regimes have been harnessing entertainment media platforms and influential actors to amplify the visibility of state-created content, with empirical evidence from China. Together, these studies contribute to our understanding of how digital technologies are changing not only the content of propaganda, but also the way in which propaganda materials are produced and disseminated.

Speaker Bio:

Yingdan Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, and co-director of the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab. Her research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation. She uses computational and qualitative methods to understand the evolution and engagement of digital propaganda in authoritarian regimes and how individuals encounter and communicate multimodal (mis)information in AI-mediated environments. Her work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals across communication, political science, and human-computer interaction. Before joining Northwestern, Yingdan received her Ph.D. in Communication and a Ph.D. minor in Political Science from Stanford University.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92346340083
Passcode: NICO24

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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