Page 46 - ISLA 240 REVIEW PACKET

ILSA 303 – VALUES & TECHNOLOGY
PROJECT TWO – PART B INDIVIDUAL TOPIC PRESENTATION FORM
NAME: Alex Paulsen PRESENTATION DATE: 10/18/18
TOPIC: : How did Russia influence the 2016 election through Facebook? How did
that affect everyday people? What can we learn from this?
CONCLUSION: (500 words or less)
When embarking on this project, I quickly found out how complex and extensive my topic is. I definitely felt like I got lost in the wormhole, but I came out with a wealth of information. I revised my PowerPoint a number of times, taking out information to meet the time limit. I knowingly exceeded five minutes in my presentation because it is a confusing situation that needed a thorough explanation. Limiting the scope of this project to just how Russia influenced the 2016 election via Facebook was extremely helpful.
I recently had a lecture on giving PowerPoint presentations in one of my marketing classes, and I tried to apply those techniques in this presentation. A major technique was to have the slides be driven by visuals instead of words. I created my slides from scratch, and they were dominated primarily by pictures and icons to illustrate my points. I also created a roadmap in my presentation that clearly laid out the “chapters” of my PowerPoint. Lastly, I applied the “rule of three.” This is about presenting ideas in groups of three, which is easier for the audience to remember. My presentation was broken into three parts, and I had three final recommendations for the audience.
My conclusion validated my assumptions going into the project: Russia’s influence campaign helped Trump get elected as our President. This is a nuanced conclusion; another goal of the campaign was to increase political divisiveness. They accomplished this goal through releasing inflammatory information on many different topics, and some of this information negatively targeted Trump.
If I were to investigate further into my topic, there are a couple avenues I could take. One major question is whether or not Trump and his campaign team colluded with Russia. This is a major aspect of the “Russia probe” investigation, and it is still up in the air. Another path I could take is to explore why Russia would want Trump to win the presidency. Being two years into his term, there are a lot of actions and policies that have come out of the Trump administration, that may or may not be in line with Russia’s expectations of Trump as a president. It would be interesting to discuss their hopes of a Trump presidency and evaluate if any of them have panned out. Lastly, I could delve further into Russia’s misinformation campaign. Their campaigned spanned other social media platforms and other