Philip N. Howard

Howard was one of the first to investigate the impact of digital media on political campaigning in advanced democracies, and he was the first political scientist to define and study "astroturf" political movements as the managed perception of grassroots support through astroturfing in his research on the Gore and Bush presidential campaigns. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (2005) is about how politicians and lobbyists in the United States use the internet to manipulate the public and violate privacy.[4] His research on technology and social change has been prescient. The subject's study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election did not identify the Russian sources of disinformation that other investigations have alluded to.[5]

Howard wrote presciently about the role of the internet in transforming Political Islam, and is the author of The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2010) which argues that how states respond to new information technologies has become a defining feature of both democracy and authoritarianism. Howard demonstrated that the internet was having an important impact on political Islam. The book was published before the Arab Spring, and shows how new social movements in North Africa and the Middle East were using social media to outmaneuver some of the region's dictators, partly because these regimes lacked effective responses to online evidence of their abuses.[6] Using Charles Ragin's method of "qualitative comparative analysis" Howard investigated technology diffusion and political Islam and explained trends in many countries, with the exception of Tunisia and Egypt. But very shortly the trends in social activism and political Islam he had identified appeared in those two countries as well in the "Arab Spring."

Democracy's Fourth Wave? (2013), with Muzammil M. Hussain, suggests that turning off the Internet, as the Mubarak regime did on January 28, 2011, actually strengthened the revolution by forcing people into the streets to seek information.[7] It sees events like the Arab Spring as "early signs of the next big wave of democratization. But this time, it will be wrestled into life in the digital living room of the global community." [8] His research and commentary is regularly featured in the media, including recent contributions about media politics in the US, Hungary and around the world the New York Times and Washington Post.[9][10][11]

In Pax Technica (2015) he argues that the Internet of Things will be the most important tool of political communication we have ever built. He advocates for more public input in its design and more civic engagement with how this information infrastructure gets used.[12]

In 2014 he hypothesized that political elites in democracies would soon be using algorithms over social media to manipulate public opinion, a process he called "computational propaganda." His research on political redlining, astroturf campaigns and fake news inspired a decade of work and became particularly relevant during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.[13][14] His research has exposed the global impact of bots and trolls on public opinion.

A number of serious criticisms have been leveled against Howard’s objectivity and the validity of his research’s designs.

In Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s article Between a Ranch and a Hard Place: Violence, Scarcity, and Meaning in Chiapas, Mexico in Violent Environments he states that Howard: “manipulate[s)]… a complicated array of political, economic, historical and social factors into a straightforward liner model of escalating scarcities”

Erik Wemple in The Washington Post and Elizabeth Harrington in The Washington Free Beacon have pointed out categorization errors in his research that indicate bias against those who voted for President Donald J. Trump . [15] [16]

John Burn-Murdoch, a data-visualization journalist for The Financial Times and Anthony B. Masters of the Royal Statistical Society have also claimed that the testimony that Howard provided to the Government on Brexit was invalid due to incorrect electoral numbers, his ignorance of click-thru rates, and his inability to provide any evidence of conversation rates for political marketing. [17]

After a reporter presented one of the research findings from a report that Dr. Howard was listed as the Primary Investigator on, President Rodrigo Duterte said: “Oxford University? That’s a school for stupid people.” [18]