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Dear all, (With apologies for cross-posting.) Please join us on *March 10th at 12–1pm at 177 Huntington Ave. (11th Floor)* for a talk by Jennifer Pan of Stanford University: “You Won’t Believe How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait.” News organizations frequently use “clickbait” style headlines to grab our attention, but we may not realize that a government could use the same tactics. In this talk, Professor Pan will explore how clickbait strategies are being used to support government propaganda in China. The event details are below—please see the event page and attached flyer for more information: https://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/event/jennifer-pan/ <https://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/event/jennifer-pan/> *Abstract:* With the advent of mass media, government propaganda became highly visible, and authoritarian regimes could easily reach large, captive audiences. We argue that the proliferation of social media and digital technologies has made it necessary for authoritarian regimes to expand their strategies beyond propaganda in order to make propaganda visible. We show how the Chinese government employs such a strategy—disseminating social media posts containing nonpolitical content and clickbait to capture clicks as a means of making the government’s social media account and its propaganda messages more visible. We combine ethnographic methods with the collection of a novel dataset of nearly 200,000 posts made by 213 Chinese city-level governments on WeChat. We use topic modeling, natural language processing, and large-scale human coding to analyze these data, and we find that propaganda agencies across China are heavily reliant on clickbait, and that clickbait is associated with more views and greater reach of the government online. This paper is co-authored with Yingdan Lu, a PhD student in Communication at Stanford. *Biography:* Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication, and an Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University. Her research is at the intersection of political communication, computational social science, and authoritarian politics. Pan focuses on how autocrats control information to shape public preferences and behaviors in the digital age, using experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other non-democratic regimes. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, and Science. Pan received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government, and she received her A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. More information on her work can be found at jenpan.com. This event is free and open to the public, but if you are not a member of the Northeastern community, please email Sarah Connell, [log in to unmask], to register. Lastly, please take a moment and share this information with anyone who may be interested. Kind regards, Laura Johnson -- *Laura Johnson (she/her)* Ph.D. Student, English Coordinator, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks <https://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/> Northeastern University ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the BOSTONDH list, click the following link: https://listserv.neu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=BOSTONDH