Language and Propaganda in times of War

You can spot propagandistic techniques in language in many types of situations — in most political discourse, on social media, in mainstream journalism, or in advertising campaigns. But at no time propaganda is as dangerous and destructive as in the time of war. In this talk, Dr. Pertsova will use recent examples from Russian media to demonstrate specific tools of propagandistic language — logical fallacies, framing, metaphor, loaded language, etc. and discuss how they affect reasoning. Dr. Pertsova will consider cognitive biases that explain why our brains are so easily tricked by propaganda. Dr. Pertsova will also discuss some recent machine learning models aimed at automatically identifying and labeling propagandistic techniques in language.