Event Date
Dr. Harry Yaojun Yan
Public Perceptions of Social Bots and AI-facilitated Political Manipulation
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, concerns over their potential impact on democracy and politics have become increasingly urgent. This talk presents a multi-project research program that systematically investigates public concerns about automated agents and generative AI's impact on elections and democracy. The first part of the talk presents a series of experiments that examine social media users’ discernment of social bots with or without explicit political personas. The results showed that users have moderate discernment skills but are susceptible to cognitive biases that impair their ability to distinguish between bots and authentic users. Partisan biases, in particular, will interfere with their judgment. Exposure to social bots also reinforces their preferences for stricter bot regulation. The second part of the talk explores ongoing projects that examine growing public concerns about how emerging AI technologies may intensify political manipulation.
Bio: Harry Yaojun Yan (Ph.D., Indiana University-Bloomington) is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Cyber Policy Center and Social Media Lab, at Stanford University. He is an incoming assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism, at Texas A&M University. He received a dual-major Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences and Complex Networks & Systems CNS) from Indiana University-Bloomington and was a former Knight Fellow at the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe). His research investigates the effects of emerging media technologies on the formation of public opinion with special attention paid to digital activism, social inequality, and political polarization. His work has been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, and Scientific Reports, along with others.