Time: Wednesday March 20, 10:00 – 11:00 AM (BJT)

Zoom: 933 4666 2924; Passcode: 2024

Speaker: Yingdan Lu, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University

Abstract:

How do audiences living in countries with strong government censorship learn about foreign news? This talk presents an alternative perspective – the construction of foreign political news results from complex, transnational assemblages of online and traditional media, even in seemingly “closed” information systems such as China. By comparing narratives about the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War circulating on Chinese social media with narratives found in over 24 million articles from 10,000 Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and U.S.- based news websites, we find that transnational assemblages, rather than the government alone, shapes the inflow of information and construction of foreign news in a system of stringent censorship. This talk also introduces content- based computational frameworks for identifying multilingual, cross-country, and cross-platform digital communication.

This event is organized by the Digital Technology and Society Cluster under the Center for the Study of Contemporary China.