Virtual Sentiments

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen Collins interviews Hans Noel, an Associate Professor in the Government Department at Georgetown University, on the increasingly polarized nature of politics in the current age. Noel begins by examining the nature of polarization and the many ways in which it manifests itself. He then points to changes in polarization since the 20th century and, while...

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen interviews Jennifer Forestal, the Helen Houlahan Rigali Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, on the role that digital spaces play in a democratic environment. They discuss the ways in which the design of digital spaces can incentivize or discourage certain types of speech, and how digital boundaries play a key role in...

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen interviews Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, on the presence of disinformation in social media. Brooking gives his definition of disinformation and highlights particular aspects of social media that frequently interact with the rapid expansion of disinformation. The two also dis...

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen interviews Martin Gurri, a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, on the relationship between politics and media. Martin explains his concept of how communications technology evolves in great leaps, instead of incremental steps, and identifies what he considers to be the five great epochs in the evolution of communications technology. Additi...

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen interviews Weifeng Zhong of the Mercatus Center on his work with the Policy Change Index (PCI), a series of open-source machine learning projects that predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda publications. Weifeng explains how his shocking revelation about the Tianneman Square massacre inspired him to create the...

Whether it is the intensification of polarization, the dissemination of disinformation, or the expansion of surveillance, today’s digital technologies seem to radically disrupt liberal democratic politics. But what if the problems we face are less new than they first appear? In this podcast series, Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with the most pressing problems in p...