CPP Director Erik Nisbet recently appeared on NBC Chicago to discuss how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape modern political campaigns as the 2026 election cycle approaches. The segment explored the growing use of AI-generated content in campaign advertising, including tools that can replicate voices, generate images or videos, and quickly produce tailored political messages. Campaigns are
A new study by CCPP Faculty Director Erik Nisbet, CCPP graduate affiliate Chloe Mortenson, and R. Kelly Garrett (Ohio State University) examines how Americans’ beliefs about online misinformation may influence their satisfaction with democracy. The article, “The Presumed Prevalence/Persuasiveness of Online Misinformation and Americans’ Dissatisfaction With Democracy,” was recently published in Social Media + Society. Over the past
Yingdan Lu, director of the Computational Media and Politics Lab at Northwestern University and CCPP faculty affiliate, has published a new article in Political Communication examining how celebrity fan communities engage with state propaganda on social media platforms in China. The article, “Performative Propaganda Engagement: How Celebrity Fans Engage with State Propaganda on Weibo,” offers
Faculty and graduate affiliates from the Center for Communication & Public Policy (CCPP) recently presented new research at the Southern Political Science Association 2026 Annual Meeting, examining how large language models (LLMs) conceptualize democracy across national and institutional contexts. The paper, Political Divergence of AI: Cross-National Differences in Large Language Models’ Perspectives on Democracy, led
The Global Disinformation in a Post-Moderation World Symposium, co-organized by the Center for Communication & Public Policy and Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, co-sponsored by the Kyiv-Mohyla Foundation of America, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the Polsky Foundation, this two-day event brings together leading experts from academia, policy, industry, and civil
Applications are now open for a Postdoctoral Research Opportunity to join the Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group, a major interdisciplinary initiative in which CCPP is participating, supported by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. This position is part of the previously announced Buffett-supported grant advancing global benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs)
The Center for Communication & Public Policy (CCPP) is pleased to co-sponsor the Opening Plenary of Global Disinformation in a Post-Moderation World, hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in partnership with Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Kyiv-Mohyla Foundation of America. This flagship event, held at the Chicago Council,
The Center for Communication and Public Policy (CCPP) is part of an interdisciplinary Northwestern team that has received a $200,000 award from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs to support the Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group. The project includes CCPP Director Erik Nisbet and CCPP faculty affiliate Yingdan Lu, who join collaborators across communication,
The Center for Communication & Public Policy (CCPP) is proud to celebrate the outstanding work of our graduate affiliates presenting at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR), held November 21–22 in Chicago. This year’s conference theme — “Fifty Years of Measuring Change: Where we were, where we are,
Congratulations to CCPP faculty affiliate Dr. Ayşe D. Lokmanoğlu, whose new co-authored article, “Topic Modeling of Video and Image Data: A Visual Semantic Unsupervised Approach,” has just been published in Communication Methods and Measures. The paper introduces VisTopics, an innovative computational framework for analyzing large-scale visual datasets by combining AI-powered image captioning, unsupervised clustering, and
