Echo Chambers, AI & Bot-Driven Disinformation: New Challenges in PD
Event Information
Description
This session will examine how public diplomacy practitioners need to adjust strategies and tactics for the modern information ecosystem, including understanding echo chambers, automated disinformation, algorithmic bias, and the proliferation and diversity of foreign propaganda efforts.
Congressman Mike Rogers (retired), former Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, will keynote the event, followed by a panel featuring the following speakers:
- Tom Cochran, Former White House, State Department Technology Lead and Acquia’s Vice President and Chief Digital Strategist
- Markos Kounalakis, J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution
- Matt Chessen, Foreign Service Science, Technology and Foreign Policy Fellow @ GW
- Ethan Porter, Assistant Professor, GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs
- Ory Rinat, State Department Transition Team Digital Lead
With welcoming remarks from Dr. Janet Steele, Director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication and ACPD Commission Members.
ACPD's latest report, Can Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet? Bots, Echo Chambers, and Disinformation will be published and distributed at the session.
Organizer U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy & GW's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication
Organizer of Echo Chambers, AI & Bot-Driven Disinformation: New Challenges in PD
Since 1948, the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD) has been charged with appraising U.S. Government activities intended to understand, inform and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities. The ACPD conducts research and symposiums that provide honest assessments and informed discourse on public diplomacy efforts across government. It reports to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress. Currently, the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs supports it.
ACPD serves as a convener for the variety of practitioners throughout the U.S. government who work to communicate and build relationships with foreign audiences, in addition to the researchers, practitioners and thought leaders outside of the government who can help us rethink the future of public diplomacy. Its primary product is the Comprehensive Annual Report on Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting Activities, which breaks down roughly $1.8 billion of programs worldwide.
GW's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC) is a leading organization in the field of public diplomacy and global communication. Based at The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs and jointly administered out of the Elliott School of International Affairs, the Institute provides a forum for faculty, students, and working professionals on global issues in the following areas:
- Interactions between new media, national security, and public diplomacy
- U.S. foreign policy priorities in the developing world
- Challenges to whole-of-government public diplomacy and strategic communication
- Global perspectives and approaches to public diplomacy
- Gender issues in security, communication, and diplomacy
Activities include speaker and panel events; media training workshops for international delegations; and graduate scholarships, all of which promote the greater understanding and practice of public diplomacy, or the relationship between governments and foreign publics.
The Institute was established in 2005 through the generous support of the Walter Roberts Endowment, named after the late diplomat and celebrated public diplomacy practitioner, Dr. Walter Roberts.
