Post-truth, disinformation, bots, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump….we live in a world of media manipulation run amock. To understand the new propaganda, and what to do about it, we need to grasp both the cultural and technological dynamics in play, which is what this panel sets out to do.
Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda – Adventures in the War Against Reality will be joined by Joanna Kavenna, author of new tech-dystopian novel Zed, and Dr Martin Moore of Kings College London, author of Democracy Hacked: How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics, to grapple with both the philosophical and computational dramas of the disinformation age.
Joanna Kavenna is a British novelist, essayist and travel writer. She is the author of The Ice Museum, Inglorious (which won the Orange Prize for New Writing), The Birth of Love, Come to the Edge and A Field Guide to Reality. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, Spectator, London Review of Books and New York Times and she has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College Oxford and St John's College Cambridge. In 2011 she was named as one of the Telegraph's 20 Writers Under 40 and in 2013 was listed as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
To pre-order a copy of Joanna's new book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to Zed.
Martin Moore (@martinjemoore) is Senior Lecturer in Political Communication Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Policy Institute at King’s. Before joining King’s, Martin was the founding director of the Media Standards Trust (MST), an independent charity dedicated to fostering high standards in the news media, from 2006-2015. During this time the MST won a Prospect Think Tank of the Year Award (2011) and a Knight News Challenge award (2008). He completed his doctorate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2004, where he subsequently taught undergraduates in history. Before completing his doctorate, Martin spent over a decade working in media and communications – with the BBC, Channel 4, NTL, AT&T and others.
To pre-order a copy of Martin's latest book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to Democracy Hacked.
Peter Pomerantsev (@peterpomeranzev) is co-director of the Arena project and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs, LSE. Peter is an author, TV producer and media expert. Peter has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He writes for publications including the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Politico, Atlantic and many others. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It has been translated into over a dozen languages.
To pre-order a copy of Peter's book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to This Is Not Propaganda.
Sophia Gaston (@sophgaston) is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs, LSE. She is a social and political researcher, who conducts international projects on public opinion, specialising in both qualitative fieldwork and quantitative analysis. Sophia’s work is especially focused on social and political change, populism, the media and democracy - with a focus on threats to governance in Western nations. She is also an Academic Fellow at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, and the Managing Director of the British Foreign Policy Group. Previously, Sophia was the Director of the Centre for Social and Political Risk, and the Deputy Director and Head of International Research at Demos think tank. She has previously also held research and strategic roles in a range of UK and international NGOs, the civil service, and private sector, including working as a political speechwriter in Premier & Cabinet in Australia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.
The Institute of Global Affairs (@LSEIGA) aims to maximise the impact of LSE's leading expertise across the social sciences by shaping inclusive and locally-rooted responses to the most important and pressing global challenges.
This event forms part of the “Shape the World” series, held in the run up to the LSE Festival, a week-long series of events taking place from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, free to attend and open to all, exploring how social sciences can make the world a better place. The full programme will be available online from January 2020.
Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEDisinformation
Podcast
A podcast of this event is available to download from This Is Not Propaganda.
Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.