Elihu Katz Colloquium: Elizabeth Dubois, University of Ottawa

"Election Campaigns, Online Influencers, and What We Don’t Know About Personal Influence"

About the Talk

From opinion leadership to social media influencer marketing, popular social media accounts are being integrated into election campaigns around the world. Online influencers’ ability to reach targeted and often hard to reach audiences could be a helpful advancement in campaign strategy but, if left unchecked, could also exacerbate online harms or lead to electoral interference. So far, we know little about how influencers interact in campaigns, what their roles are, or whether they are actually influential. In this talk Dubois synthesizes current literature and presents early findings from a new study, questioning what counts as “personal influence,” whether opinion leaders and influencers can be measured the same way, and whether legal and regulatory frameworks globally are ready for political influencers in elections. 

About the Speaker

Elizabeth Dubois (Ph.D., University of Oxford) is an Associate Professor and University Research Chair in Politics, Communication and Technology at the University of Ottawa where she runs the Pol Comm Tech Lab and is a member of the Center for Law, Technology and Society. 

She is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University and an Affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina.

Her work examines political uses of digital media, including artificial intelligence, political social media influencers, and online harassment of public figures.

She hosts the Wonks and War Rooms podcast where political communication theory meets on the ground strategy.

Find her on Twitter @lizdubois and at www.polcommtech.ca or check out her latest edited book, Citizenship in a Connected Canada.