David Moscrop | Are We Too Dumb for Democracy?

As an academic, writer, and political commentator, it would be safe to say that David Moscrop could enter into any political conversation with an opinion, and a well-informed one at that. His studies and research focus primarily on democratic deliberation, citizenship, social media, communication, and how we make political decisions – both good and bad.

Moscrop is a political theorist and postdoctoral fellow in the Scholarly Communications Lab at Simon Fraser University, where he studies information flows in the digital public sphere and democratic decision making. He completed a PhD in in political science at the University of British Columbia in spring 2017, and is currently working on a project focused on how knowledge circulates on the internet and what that means for citizen participation in contemporary democracies.

Moscrop is also working on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project at UBC led by Chris Tenove and Mark Warren. We are researching digital threats to democracy, including microtargeting, Big Data, fake news, bots, and hacking. Their focus is to identify the nature of these threats, which parts of our democracy they threaten, and what we should be doing in response.

He is also a regular contributor to Maclean’s magazine and other radio, print, and television outlets offering political commentary and exploring democratic theory. Watch for his first book Too Dumb for Democracy? Why we Make Bad Political Decisions and How we Can Make Better Ones, scheduled for release by Goose Lane Editions in the spring of 2019.