ILDT member was a debater at the Yasin (April) Conference
Senior Research Fellow at the International Laboratory of Digital Transformation in Public Administration at the Higher School of Economics Maria Yudina acted as a debater at the session "Citizens and the State in the Age of Digital Communications" of the XXV Yasin (April) International Scientific Conference on Economic and Social Development.
The session was moderated by Evgeny Sedashov, Associate Professor of the Department of Politics and Management at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences. The first speaker was K.D. Serebryakov from the St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation with a report on the topic "Mental characteristics of the architecture of digital platforms in solving urban problems and their impact on the nature of users' political communication." He told the session participants about the study of the features of the emerging mentality within the digital platforms responsible for updating and solving problems in the housing and communal services sector. Serebryakov analyzed the content of the digital platforms of St. Petersburg ("Our St. Petersburg") and the Leningrad region ("National Expertise") using a discourse analysis based on the parametric model of judgments by A. Kruglyansky.
The second speakers were HSE staff members M.M. Rodionova and A.A. Sizov with a speech on the topic "Privacy or security?": a meta-analysis of the determinants of attitudes towards surveillance and surveillance. Purposes of their study include identification the factors that determine the everyday attitude to surveillance; identification of the moderators of the relationship between the identified factors and the attitude to surveillance using the meta-analysis procedure. M.M. Rodionova and A. A. Sizov reported the key results of the meta-analysis: concerns about privacy are negatively associated with support for surveillance, while concerns about security – on the contrary. The speakers are preparing an English-language publication on the conducted research.
The third report was "To Denigrate the bright and clean, to whitewash the dark and dirty": Russians' perceptions of the consequences of fake news". A.D. Kazun prepared the report with the support of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 23-78-01206. She spoke about the results of an empirical study: in 2024, 119 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Russian informants of various ages and levels of involvement in news consumption. The perception of fake news in Russia reflects a complex interplay of personal experience, public discussion, and sociocultural context. In the arguments of the informants, a substitution of concepts associated with the fragmentation of society was revealed: there is a separation between the groups "we" (carriers of "correct information") and "they" (consumers of fakes associated with "enemies"). According to the results of A.D. Kazun, the public discussion about fake news has formed stable ideas about the mass character and ubiquity of false content. The materials of the interviews clearly contradict the theory of truth by default ("truth-default theory", authored by Levine, 2014), according to which people tend to evaluate the information they receive as reliable.
Debater Maria Yudina thanked the speakers who shared the research results, asked clarifying questions and offered recommendations for the preparation of publications in continuation of the work carried out.