Upcoming Event: Oden Institute & Dept. of Government

Propaganda ia Already Influencing Large Language Models: Evidence from Training Data, Audits, and Real-world Usage

Joshua Tucker, New York University

Abstract

Biography

Joshua A. Tucker is a Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor, Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University.  He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia. He is one of the co-founders and co-Directors of the NYU  Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). 

Professor Tucker’s original research was in comparative politics with an emphasis on mass political behavior in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, including elections and voting, the development of partisan attachment, public opinion formation, and mass protest, as well as the use of social media in facilitating all forms of political participation.  He is the author of Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990-99 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and co-author of the Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017). 

For the past dozen year, through his work at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, which he co-founded, Professor Tucker has been at the forefront of efforts to explore the intersection of social and digital media and politics, as well as developing methods for utilizing digital trace data to study politics. His research has included studies of partisan echo chambers and polarization, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, the online information environment around news veracity, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, foreign influence campaigns, Russian bots and trolls, and a more recent line of research around Generative AI, political science research, and politics.  He is the co-editor the edited volume Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, and the co-chair of the external academic research team on the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study.