This event is part of a three-part symposium on Security, Privacy, and Innovation: Reshaping Law for the AI Era. The first, Responding to AI Enabled Surveillance and Digital Authoritarianism is on September 17, 2021, the second, Constitutional Values and the Rule of Law in the AI Era: Confronting a Changing Threat Landscape is on September 24, 2021, and the […]
“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1967. Today, concerns run especially high over the fraught relationship between truth and politics, as majorities of Republican […]
Event Listing Header As many media accounts have recounted, Stop AAPI Hate reported that anti-Asian violence soared during the first wave of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. From mid-March 2020 to the end of February 2021, 3,795 “Anti-Asian hate incidents” were reported to Stop AAPI Hate. North of the U.S. border in the Canadian province of […]
This event is part of a three-part symposium on Security, Privacy, and Innovation: Reshaping Law for the AI Era. The first, Responding to AI Enabled Surveillance and Digital Authoritarianism is on September 17, 2021, the second, Constitutional Values and the Rule of Law in the AI Era: Confronting a Changing Threat Landscape is on September 24, 2021, and the […]
This session will provide an opportunity to discuss the challenges of reporting on Capitol Riots. Kadia Goba was on the ground reporting from inside the Capitol and Malachy Browne used eyewitness footage to piece together events from the thousands of livestreams and posts to social media. We will hear them talk about their experiences from […]
While trustworthy online spaces benefit everyone, untrustworthy content and behaviour can divide, confuse, and cause real harm. The annual Conference for Truth and Trust Online is organised as a unique collaboration between practitioners, technologists, academics and platforms, to share, discuss, and collaborate on useful technical innovations and research in the space. Our mission is to […]
Tech sector whistleblowers have played an increasingly vital role in exposing racism and toxic workplace environments, algorithmic bias, and other platform harms. But the cost of coming forward with information can be tremendous – including psychological, legal, and employment ramifications. This webinar will explore what is needed to build and maintain safe and secure channels […]
Event featured image, but exclude link Event content Register here for the launch event for this highly anticipated event. News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent […]
Hardly a day passes without a new technology ethics scandal–from privacy violations on social media platform to biased algorithms to controversial data collection for training facial recognition systems. In computing practice and research, good intentions sometimes still lead to negative consequences. This talk describes three lessons from my research that inform ethical practices in studying, […]
How should the government regulate election-related speech? Trump’s “Big Lie” raises the question of whether lies about election results should be regulated by the social media platforms, as well as the government. But of course, these kinds of lies are not the only kinds of election-related lies that raise thorny free speech questions. Can or […]
Activists. Journalists. Elected Representatives. Public Intellectuals. When women are vocal about political and social issues, too-often they are flogged with attacks via social networking sites, comment sections, discussion boards, email, and direct message. Rather than targeting their ideas, the abuse targets their identities, pummeling them with rape threats, attacks on their appearance and presumed sexual […]
Event Listing Header Artificial Intelligence (AI) and social media are finding useful applications in health care, yet, their use may perpetuate or even accentuate inequities, disparities, and the critical role of social determinants of health, or even facilitate the spread of health-related misinformation. The symposium will convene AI experts, medical researchers and practitioners, and computer […]
There is a lot of concern about how the news ecosystem affects public opinion, political polarization, and democracy. Most of the research and public debate focuses on overtly fake material, particularly as it is distributed through social media. But, the vast majority of news consumption is actual produced by mainstream media, and the most common […]
Inspired by ethnographic work with queer of color users of the platform Tumblr during its heyday from 2010-2015 and using the Tumblr presence of Filipinx transfeminine visual and performance artist Mark Aguhar as a recurring touchstone, this talk’s provocation is that the assumptive ways in which a social media platform “should” be designed — singular […]
Join Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic and James McAuley, The Atlantic contributor and author of The House of Fragile Things, a history of Dreyfus-era France, for a conversation around the long history of conspiracy theory and its role in political culture, then and now. The discussion will be moderated by Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at Penn. The […]
Popular narratives about how social media shapes political polarization emphasize echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and algorithmic radicalization. Yet a careful review of the scientific literature indicates there is surprisingly little evidence that these factors shape political beliefs or inter-group attitudes. Drawing upon multiple field experiments, large-scale analysis of social media data, and longitudinal in-depth […]
Lina Dencik is Professor in Digital Communication and Society at Cardiff’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture and Co-Founder/Director of the Data Justice Lab. Her research concerns the interplay between media developments and social and political change, with a particular focus on resistance, governance, and the politics of data. She has published five books including […]
Over the past two months, the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” series has chronicled the ways that Facebook and its platforms favor elites, harm teenagers’ mental health, encourage toxicity, take weak action to stop human trafficking and drug cartels, suppress political movements, and ignore the concerns of their employees that Facebook can clean up its […]
What is the future of the internet? Thirty years after the creation of the first web page, what have we learned about the impact of the internet on communication, connection, and democracy? Join the Knight Foundation for Lessons from the First Internet Ages, a virtual symposium that will explore and evaluate what key figures in […]
A few years ago, Finale Doshi-Velez and Mason Kortz – and a squad of collaborators – unpacked explanation as one way to hold AI systems accountable. Many frameworks for AI regulation and best practices have since emerged. In this conversation, Finale and Mason return to the question of accountability and regulation for AI: What are […]
What is the future of the Internet? Thirty years after the creation of the first web page, what have we learned about the impact of the Internet on communication, connection, and democracy? Join the Knight Foundation for Lessons from the First Internet Ages, a virtual symposium that will explore and evaluate what key figures in the development […]
When platform researchers undertake new projects, it is crucial to assess legal risks. Yet the legal constraints on platform research are often ambiguous. This webinar will explore what legal resources platform researchers need, as well as how to make decisions to reach research objectives.
As algorithms increasingly automate decision-making processes, filter information flows, and mediate our social interactions, ethical concerns immediately follow. Questions of fairness, accountability, and transparency permeate the growing set of concerns around the social and ethical implications of algorithms. As a growing community of scholars grapples with the ethics of algorithms, how can their findings be […]
The challenges facing global news-industry leaders have seldom been as great as today. Economic disruption, technology transformation and a frontal assault on an independent free press as ‘enemies of the people’ are creating unprecedented headwinds for news leaders. How do they lead in such tumultuous times? And where do they see opportunities for success beyond […]
Across the country, libraries, educators and civil society generally are leading in playing vital roles in addressing health misinformation in communities. We look forward to hearing insights from experts in the field on how we can best mitigate the impacts of misinformation and empower individuals to seek factual information. Join Knight Foundation and the Digital […]
This conversation is off the record. Please use this registration form if you wish to join us online. Please note that our speaker will be presenting in person at Harvard Kennedy School in Rubenstein 414AB (ELLWOOD DEMOCRACY LAB). Anyone with a Harvard ID is invited to join us on a first-come, first-served basis.
About the Speaker Sara García Santamaría is an Associate Professor at Universitat Jaume I and Universitat Blanquerna – Ramon Llull in Spain. She holds a Doctorate in Journalism Studies from the University of Sheffield (UK), where her research explored how the Cuban state-run media constructs the role of the people in public debate. Having completed […]
Online social networks often mirror inequality in real-world networks, from historical prejudice, economic or social factors. Such disparities are often picked up and amplified by algorithms that leverage social data for the purpose of providing recommendations, diffusing information, or forming groups. In this talk, we’ll discuss possible explanations for algorithmic bias in social networks, specifically […]
On Tuesday, November 16th at 6:00 pm ET in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, this year’s Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press will be delivered by Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder and CEO of Rappler.com, Fall 2021 Shorenstein Center Fellow, and Center for Public Leadership Hauser Leader. Shorenstein Center on Media, […]
Democracies are struggling to balance freedom of expression with equality for the weak as well as accountability for harmful speech. There is growing alarm at how internet giants distort the marketplace of ideas, undermine human dignity and derail truth-seeking — but little consensus on what should be done. Can we still have faith in the […]
How can we ethically engage a military-derived technology that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives from refrigerators to furniture? The weaponizing potential of the internet was part and partial to its initial conceit yet this history is often forgotten and therefore remains unconnected to the current violence that this life changing technology has enabled […]
Expanding positive freedoms that enable greater opportunities for communication—as opposed to emphasizing only negative freedoms that protect us from harm—is foundational to reforming our media system so that it serves everyone. Even as concerns about social harms currently dominate contemporary policy discussions, it is important to articulate collective needs and the political imaginary necessary for […]
We measure the immediate and medium-term effects of 21 highly-trafficked pieces of misinformation and fact-checks during the 2020 U.S. election with eight panel experiments (N = 17,681). Exposure to misinformation increased false beliefs by an average of 4.3 points on a 100-point belief certainty scale. Exposure to fact-checks more than corrected this effect, decreasing false […]
Research indicates women have less influence than men in a variety of professional settings, including politics. We conducted a field experiment on a social media platform where Democrats were randomly assigned female or male avatar before discussing their preferred candidate for the 2020 presidential primary election. By measuring changes in people’s preferences before and after […]
This talk will be hybrid in-person and via Zoom. Register in advance here for this meeting using your institutional email address. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Technology is often designed and deployed without critical reflection of the values that it embodies. Value trade-offs—between security and privacy, […]
Image-based abuse is a public health crisis that silences marginalized groups and degrades public discourse. Ranging across the COVID-19 pandemic, political campaigns and social network reform, image-based abuse finds its way into nearly every pressing public issue today. This symposium will identify patterning in its occurrence, strategize research agendas for its clarification and develop policy […]
The mob assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 opened a new chapter in domestic terrorism. For the first time in our nation’s history, America experienced its first non-peaceful post-election transfer of power. To date, more than 660 arrests have been made, and more than 12% of those arrested were veterans of the […]
It all feels like a precursor to a bad joke: What do foreign agents, white supremacists, conspiracists, snake oil salesmen, political operatives, white academics, and a disgruntled bunch of zoomers have in common? The groups have collided in a centrifuge of chaos online, where the tactics they use to hide their identities and manipulate audiences […]
Thirty years ago this December, the Soviet Union broke up, creating 15 new countries and high expectations that many of them would embrace democracy — including guarantees of freedom of the press. Thirty years on, only a handful of the post-Soviet states have met expectations for free, independent media. Several others maintain strict, Soviet-style controls […]
Advances in digital technologies and artificial intelligence hold great promise to boost economic prosperity. But as these technologies transform nearly every aspect of business and work, they are reshaping growth and distributional dynamics in ways that can increase economic inequality. Indeed, inequality has been rising in many countries, notably in the United States. Rising inequality […]
Information overload is something that humans have dealt with for millennia. During different historical eras, massive increases in what was available to know has motivated the creation of systems for sorting, indexing, and compiling information as well as concerns that the abundance of information might cause cultural anxiety or even drive people to madness. The […]
For education policymakers, the last two years have been among the most tumultuous and challenging in U.S. history. Issue after issue has stirred controversy, including COVID-induced school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, critical race theory, and transgender students’ rights. Local school board meetings have been stages for many conflicts. Board members are confronting angry protestors […]
Civil society and government stakeholders have very low trust in industry, based on repeated violations of the latter’s own promises. Concurrently, information asymmetry is an initial hurdle to both studying and proposing solutions for platform governance. However, as with everything in this space, the answer is rarely as simple as it may seem at first […]
This talk will draw on research from “Wearing Many Hats,” a forthcoming Data & Society report authored by Matt Goerzen and Gabriella Coleman. Dr. Coleman describes her talk as follows: Our report examines the transformative period in which many hackers moved from a vilified underground subculture into a domain of respected professionalism, playing a privileged […]
A newly released report from the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) – A Lie Can Travel: Election Disinformation in the United States, Brazil, and France – published by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS), explores recent case studies of election disinformation in the U.S., Brazil, and France. It also examines tactics for mitigating the problem, including interventions by […]
When social media platforms first launched nearly two decades ago, they were seen as a force for good – a way to connect with family and friends, learn and explore new ideas, and engage with social and political movements. Yet, as the Facebook Papers and other research have documented, these same platforms have become vectors […]
The George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics (IDDP) and The University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) invite you to join them for The Capitol Coup One Year Later: How Research Can Assess and Counter Threats to Democracy, a two day conference exploring key questions surrounding January […]
Nearly one year ago, a violent mob broke into the United States Capitol in an effort to halt the certification of the electoral vote and overturn the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump. The insurrection was, thankfully, unsuccessful. But its echoes continue to reverberate today: Many in the Republican Party attempt to deny, minimize, […]
In Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that health-related misinformation and disinformation can dangerously undermine the response to a public health crisis. Misleading information, intentional or not, has a myriad of effects, including reduced trust in public health responders, increased belief in false medical cures, and politicization of public health measures. The spread of these falsehoods has […]
Join us on Tuesday, January 25 from 12 PM – 1 PM PT for “Inclusive Content Moderation Is Innovative Content Moderation” featuring Aerica Shimizu Banks, founder of Shiso in conversation with Julie Owono, executive director of the Content Policy and Society Lab. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program […]
Event Listing Header Speaker Series Session 1: Conceptual Frameworks for Networked Feminism Join us for our Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices book launch and speaker series! About this event Bringing together contributors of the book, this speaker series explores how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces […]
What’s the best way to fight the spread of misinformation? When someone shares misleading facts about vaccines or climate change on Twitter, should we be furious — or should we try to be funny? Recent research suggests that humor has an important role in countering misinformation about science. One study found that scientists are perceived […]
As social media become major channels for the diffusion of news and information, it becomes critical to understand how the complex interplay between cognitive, social, and algorithmic biases triggered by our reliance on online social networks makes us vulnerable to manipulation and disinformation. This talk overviews ongoing network analytics, modeling, and machine learning efforts to […]
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. Video game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film, television, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can […]
On Feb. 22-24, join us virtually for the 15th Annual Knight Media Forum (KMF), where we will examine current trends impacting our democracy. Top thought leaders in philanthropy, journalism, education, tech and policy will share their insights and answer your questions about the hot topics across communities and the nation. KMF is the premiere event […]
Its ban of Twitter in 2021 marked the Nigerian state as an analog entity that forbids the agency of its digital citizens. In this talk, James Yékú will track the implications of this ban in the context of what he has called cultural netizenship, the organizing rubric for visual articulations of internet citizenship that often […]
“Nigeria’s Twitter Ban and the Logic of Cultural Netizenship” CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE EVENT ON ZOOM About the Talk Its ban of Twitter in 2021 marked the Nigerian state as an analog entity that forbids the agency of its digital citizens. In this talk, James Yékú will track the implications of this ban […]
This event will explore historic and contemporary racial discrimination in all modalities of modern media. Register Here Georgetown University Racial Justice Institute The University of Houston is a Carnegie-designated Tier One research institution and an EEO/AA institution
The extent to which we value intuitive or evidence-based reasoning has important implications for our susceptibility to misinformation. National survey data from Nov-Dec 2020 demonstrate that Trump favorability, conservatism, and Republicanism are associated with instinct-based epistemic values and a rejection of expertise and evidence. Results also indicate that these same epistemic motivations increase one’s likelihood […]
About the Talk The extent to which we value intuitive or evidence-based reasoning has important implications for our susceptibility to misinformation. National survey data from Nov-Dec 2020 demonstrate that Trump favorability, conservatism, and Republicanism are associated with instinct-based epistemic values and a rejection of expertise and evidence. Results also indicate that these same epistemic motivations […]
This year, the Committee’s Keynote event addresses pathways for the preservation of free speech while mediating the harmful effects of misinformation in our present societies. Freedom of speech has long been considered a bastion of liberal, open societies. However, in the present era, it is arguably no longer information that is scarce, but our ability […]
What are the financial, social, and human costs of misinformation? What is the price that businesses, hospitals, civil society groups, and schools pay for false or misleading information online? How can researchers support public officials and especially the communities targeted by disinformation campaigns when costing out “fake news funds” and building capacity for digital resilience? […]
Join us for a weekly webinar series organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center (CPC) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. The webinar will take place every Tuesday, starting January 11th from 12 PM – 1 PM PST over Zoom. This quarter, we feature […]
Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares. These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a […]
In this talk Claes de Vreese, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society at the University of Amsterdam, addresses how citizens see mis- and disinformation. The talk analyzes how citizens perceive the phenomenon and who they see as the main culprits. He also explores misconceptions about how algorithms work and how this may aggravate the consequences […]
From combatting violent extremism to mitigating misinformation, the news industry is caught in the middle of debates over how best to address a range of online harms. As regulators around the world consider new frameworks for content moderation, it is important to understand how efforts to reduce harmful content online can be detrimental to free […]
Welcome to Trust In News 2022: a two day virtual conference, which returns for a second year running – packed with insightful learnings, practical presentations and workshops. We’ll explore the fresh challenges in tackling disinformation and give you some of the tools you need to join the fight. Speakers will include representatives from the Trusted News Initiative: a […]
A roundtable focused on misinformation challenges in Canada and what, if anything, we can do about it. About this event This year has been marked by an influx of misinformation, from truckers motivated by COVID-19 medical misinformation to Russian information warfare and conspiracies about Ukrainian biolabs. Hear from an expert roundtable of journalists, academics, and […]
Join us for a webinar to launch IPL’s latest tool: the Congressional Tweet Tracker. We’ll show you how the tool can help you analyze trends in US immigration politics, explain the AI methods that helped build it, and describe its value for journalists, advocacy groups, and researchers. Discussion will include panelists from NYU’s Center for Social […]
The Social Media Summit @ MIT (SMS @ MIT) brings together the world’s leaders in social technology to examine one of the most critical and compelling issues of our time – the impact of social media on our democracies, our economies, and our public health — with a vision to craft meaningful solutions to the […]
Since the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling AKP government has vastly expanded its global communication apparatus to promote the country as a rising great power and the benevolent guardian of Muslims. In this presentation, Bilge Yesil will analyze the political mechanisms and ideational frameworks that underlie the new English-language outlets the AKP and its proxies developed after […]
The Colorado Sun and News Literacy Project bring you a three-part series about helping leaders teach others about fact from fiction. About this event Part one: Foundations of News Literacy will focus on strategies students need to determine fact from fiction. Part one will be held virtually over Zoom on March 31 from 6-7 p.m. […]
A central feature of the Disinformation Studies program is the annual Symposium on Disinformation Studies. The Symposium is a multiday, interdisciplinary, cross-sector conference featuring practitioners and scholars who diagnose the mechanisms and effects of information warfare, foster nuanced understanding of contemporary processes of disinformation, prognosticate on the probable evolution of disinformation, and generate interdisciplinary solutions […]
There is widespread agreement among ethicists and tech advocates that responsible AI principles requires fairness, transparency, privacy, human safety, and explanability. But it is not always clear how to operationalize these broad principles or how to handle situations when conflicts arise between them. Moving from the abstract to the concrete when developing algorithms often presents […]
With democracies across the globe under assault,The University of Chicago’s nonpartisan Institute of Politics and The Atlantic are hosting Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a groundbreaking three-day event exploring the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it. The conference, April 6 to 8, will explore the roots and scope of the […]
On April 8, 2022, the Knight Institute will host a symposium to explore how the law regulates or should regulate false and misleading speech. The symposium, titled “Lies, Free Speech, and the Law,” is being overseen by the Institute’s Senior Visiting Research Scholar Genevieve Lakier and will take place at Columbia University. The symposium will focus on five themes […]
Social media platforms generate mountains of data — about what we like, what news we read, and who we talk to. This information, for the most part, is only available to the companies themselves, meaning journalists, researchers, policymakers, and the public lack a clear understanding of how social media impacts our society. The Facebook Papers […]
The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is a Harvard Kennedy School research center dedicated to exploring and illuminating the intersection of press, politics and public policy in theory and practice. The Center strives to bridge the gap between journalists and scholars, and between them and the public.
We convened 50 leading scholars for a two-day virtual conference to present research on a range of topics at the intersection of social media and politics, with particular focus paid to the relationship between social media and polarization. *Presented virtually on Zoom due to coronavirus health precautions All times listed in Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Join your fellow Pennsylvanians in dialogue across distance and difference! The COVID-19 pandemic has further increased our reliance on social media and the Internet for information. This development, combined with underlying political partisanship, has created a breeding ground for disinformation, conspiracy theories, and information overload. In this two-hour session, we will discuss the impacts of fake […]
The concatenation of European crises shows major transformations in the contemporary international arena and points to the reasons for a structural change in the modes and uses of European public diplomacy, both inside and outside of EU institutions. Since 2008, European institutions have learned to live in a state of crisis and response: the Eurozone […]
The use of social media has become a daily routine for billions of people throughout the last decade. The problems and possibilities of this new media reality were reflected and questioned by artists long before its popularization. Cyberfeminism and Net Art layered a foundation as the digital realm as an artistic medium in the early […]
RSVP for this virtual event by Monday, May 16, 3:00 PM ET. Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street, and One Liberty Plaza, the multi-billion-dollar tower, represent a complex power play between public and private interests. In the digital realm, social media grapples with a similar contention: social networks would not exist without platform […]
Who is part of technology development, who funds that development, and how we put technology to use all influence the outcomes that are possible. To change those outcomes, we must—all of us—shift our relationship to technology—how we use it, build it, fund it, and more. Join us for a fireside chat featuring Afua Bruce, Sue […]
While trust in political institutions rapidly deteriorates and the technology and media companies that we rely on repeatedly fail to meet our information needs, the public still overwhelmingly trusts libraries. That’s because librarians fulfill a service mission as community information stewards–long serving as the only place people can go for free internet access, computer instruction, […]
An on-demand video will be posted after the event. We’ve all seen the perils of disinformation. So, how do we combat it? This panel will explore concrete proposals for dismantling disinformation in communities, on social media, and through public policy and regulation. We’ll bring together experts from multiple fields — including communication, education, behavioral psychology, […]
On Tuesday, July 26, three experts at the intersection of online privacy and digital rights will unpack these questions, and others during a virtual Dialogues & Debates Panel. Watch the panel live at 8pm PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC on Mozilla’s Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
A team of researchers from the COVID States Project will discuss the findings from their latest report comparing public attitudes regarding abortion before and after the Dobbs decision was announced, and the implications of the decision for the upcoming midterm elections.
Although misinformation has been used as a tool for propaganda throughout history, it has recently garnered immense public attention following the Brexit referendum and the US elections in 2016. Online social media outlets lack regular news media’s editorial standards and procedures for ensuring the veracity of information, and as a result, social media platforms have […]
Is there a place for government regulation to mitigate the harmful effects of misinformation? Over the past year, the EU Commission’s Digital Services Act, and the Online Safety Bill in the UK have provided some possible regulatory roadmaps. This distinguished panel will explore the current regulatory landscape in the context of online information, consider the […]
Hosted at Stanford University’s Frances. C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, the Trust and Safety Research Conference will convene trust and safety practitioners, people in government and civil society, and academics in fields like computer science, sociology, law, and political science to think deeply about trust and safety issues.
After three successful editions, the Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) returns for a 4th edition, this time hosted as a fully virtual conference by Boise State University on October 11-12, 2022. The symposium brings together researchers from multiple disciplines, including communication science, computer science, computational social science, political science, psychology, journalism, and media studies, […]
Media Consumption, Misinformation, and Polarization Social media has transformed the media and political landscape, but the vast majority of Americans still get their news from traditional sources such as local TV, cable TV, radio, and newspapers. As the media environment continues to fracture, how does news consumption and social media behavior affect how voters think […]
With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity,Creating Chaos Online, unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Dr. Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments, but also across […]
The Law School’s LawTech Center focuses on pressing questions in law and technology, including policy concerns, data analysis of legal texts and the use of technology in the legal profession. Colgate University professor Dan Bouk discusses his new book, “Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them.” Event Contact: […]
Using Social Media to Drive the Political Conversation Social media is a key tool for candidates and lawmakers to share policy positions, connect with voters, and fundraise. This seminar will present new research on how congressional candidates and officeholders use social media to gain media attention, raise money, respond to crises, and shape the broader […]
Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture The Baby Boomers are the largest and most powerful generation in recent American history. They dominate cultural and political institutions and make up the largest slice of the electorate. They’re also, on average, whiter, wealthier, and more conservative than younger generations, placing them […]
Beyond Facebook and Twitter: The Impact of New and Niche Platforms For years, Facebook and Twitter dominated scholarly research about the social media landscape. But in the last few years, new video-based social networks and alt-platforms have emerged. How do these platforms fit into the broader online ecosystem and what impact could they have in […]
Claes De Vreese is a Distinguished University Professor of AI & Society at the University of Amsterdam with a special focus on AI, media, and democracy. He also holds the Chair of Political Communication at The Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam. He is the founding inaugural scientific director of the Digital Democracy […]
Lauren Feldman is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her current research emphasizes three primary areas of interest: climate change communication, partisan media and misinformation, and comedy and social change. Feldman’s research has been published in more than thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as in several edited […]
In the wake of the FTX collapse, what impact have cryptocurrencies had on the world and what can we learn from them about the next generation of the internet we want to build? Join Molly White of Web3 is Going Just Great fame and internet and society professor Jonathan Zittrain for a wide-ranging fireside chat […]
On Thursday, February 16 at 11am ET Dave Karpf will be in conversation with Nina Hall about her recent book Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era. In her book Nina does what no other International Relations scholar has done before, research the power and spread of digital advocacy organizations. Dave and Nina will discuss her investigation of how […]
Alicia Wanless, Director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will present during this EU DisinfoLab webinar her study, co-written with Jacob N. Shapiro, professor at Princeton University: “A CERN Model for Studying the Information Environment”. Their idea? Create the equivalent of a European Center for Nuclear Research, […]
The European Media and Information Fund (EMIF) opened three calls for proposals for projects in Europe aiming to fight disinformation on 27 January 2023. EMIF will distribute up to €4,800,000 across three areas of interventions: Investigations into Disinformation Dynamics Research for a Transparent and Resilient Information Ecosystem Media and Information Literacy for Societal Resilience These […]
On February 21 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the Forum on Information and Democracy holds a session on the implementation of democratic safeguards in the information and communication space. The global conference “Internet for Trust” takes place from February 21 to 23. During the UNESCO global conference that aims at shaping guidelines for digital platform […]
Networks have dramatically changed the way we experience the world. Information access and broadcasting have been revolutionized. The Internet, the Web, and online platforms bring us together: our society is experiencing the effects, both positive and negative, of ubiquitous and unparalleled connectivity. In this talk, I will overview my decade-long journey into understanding the implications […]
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society invite you to a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI.” This event will examine how AI intersects with the profession of recruiting and with gaining access to the labor market. It will take a connect […]
Governments, humanitarian organizations and private contractors are capturing, storing and sharing an ever increasing volume of identity data, much of it pertaining to individuals such as refugees, whistleblowers and other vulnerable people who may never interact directly with the databases where their data is stored. While many countries have enacted legislation to establish baseline safety […]
The COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the lives of essential workers in America, shifting the conditions, timing, equipment, and spatial practices of their work, and expanding surveillance inside the workplace. And while employers collected increasing amounts of data about workers’ health, little of it was shared with workers themselves. The result was an information vacuum that […]
Towards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology in the 21st Century is a talk series organized and facilitated by Dr. Mathias Risse, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs, and Philosophy and Sushma Raman, Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Drawing inspiration […]
The 2023 AoIR conference addresses themes of revolutions, and their contingent promises and failures as related to digital technologies. How have digital technologies been enrolled in revolutionary projects? How have discourses of revolutions taken shape in projects of social justice, the reorganization of social orders, or as corporate manipulations of revolutionary promises? This conference is […]
Our Train the Trainer short courses are paid, week-long virtual short courses to train experienced policy professionals to teach our methods for policy impact. We are hosting 2 virtual training courses with limited enrollment: Policy Impact (tentatively scheduled from May 15-19, 2023) and Writing and Communicating for Policy (tentatively scheduled from June 5-9, 2023). Subject […]
Since Russia’s attempt to interfere with the 2016 election, the political and scholarly community has focused considerable attention on foreign influence in American politics. Researchers and media have investigated the scale and impact of Russia’s campaign, and U.S. lawmakers are now increasingly concerned about national security risks surrounding China’s ownership of TikTok. What do we […]
The scope of criminal legal surveillance, from the police to the prisons, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and criminal justice. Drawing on fieldwork conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department, University of Texas at […]
While mis- and dis-information is primarily understood in terms of its facticity, or lack thereof, the very circulation of information such as news stories is tied to the cultural contexts in which people come to trust and rely on certain channels of information. Tackling misinformation, then, requires not just repudiation of its claims but an […]
TrustCon is a global conference dedicated to the work of trust and safety professionals, convening trust and safety experts from tech, civil society, academia, and government with the goal of knowledge building and networking. TrustCon 2023 will feature a range of programming that is engaging, actionable, and timely, facilitating interactive learning experiences for all attendees. Attendees […]
March 21, April 18 and May 30 2023 at 16:00 In recent months, increased media attention has been given to AI-driven applications like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, GPT-3, ChatGPT and Bard. These programmes are commonly referred to as Generative AI: technologies that learn from existing data in order to produce new content, including audio, (realistic) images […]
Whether they are reporting on gun violence, covering protests in the post-Dobbs era, or sharing information about COVID with the public, journalists are on the frontlines, bringing important issues to light. But the risks of that reporting don’t lie equally with everyone. White women journalists face much more significant harassment than their white male counterparts, […]
In “Beyond the FTC: The Future of Privacy Enforcement,” law and computer science scholars from across the country will identify and propose solutions to barriers that inhibit enforcement of privacy rights. Featuring keynotes from Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn and FTC Director Samuel Levine. The symposium is a collaboration between UIowa’s Innovation, Business and Law […]
In his project “Real Time Monitoring of 2022 US Election-Related Misinformation and its Psycho-Social Correlates on Twitter” Jeffrey Lees seeks to answer the question what is the role of superusers? We seek to understand whether superusers are early commenters, whether superusers change the discussion agenda, and whether superusers instigate additional public interest from others.
Rest of World is excited to announce a new opportunity for reporters native to regions outside the West who want to produce a deeply reported body of work on how tech impacts labor and workers around the world. We are looking for four reporting fellows to join us for a full year and produce a […]
Recent, rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment have demonstrated technology’s potential to drastically transform and potentially improve the lives of many people across the world. From unlocking millions of hours’ worth of biological research in a fraction of the time to reducing the amount of energy used by industrial power plants, the […]
The Joint Computation+Journalism and European Data & Computational Journalism Conference aims to bring together industry, practitioners and academics in the fields of journalism and news production. It will be hosted on June 23-24 at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. This unique conference will focus on information, data, social and computer sciences, facilitating a multidisciplinary discussion on these […]
Maarten Schenk is co-founder of Belgian fact-checking outlet Lead Stories. He is very active in the field of debunking. At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, DW’s Jochen Spangenberg asked him about his views on how Artificial Intelligence will impact the production as well as spreading of disinformation, and what this means for fact-checkers like […]
To coincide with the Digital Services Act (DSA) becoming directly applicable across the EU on 17 February 2024, the DSA Observatory at the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, will hold a two-day conference on ‘The DSA and Platform Regulation’ at the Amsterdam Law School on 15-16 February 2024. The DSA is the EU’s […]
When: Wednesday, August 30th, 2023, 1–4 pm Where: Weizenbaum Institute + Zoom (hybrid) Registration: https://forms.gle/7NJngW7Ty4c8TWs3A Messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal, are increasingly used for all forms of political communication. They became important venues for people to talk about political issues, share news, and communicate with governmental institutions. Unlike public pages of social networking […]
Call for Proposals, 2023 “Writing, Thinking, and Learning with AI: Exploring Relationships of Rhetoric and Artificial Intelligence” Join us October 13–14, 2023, for a virtual conference hosted by the SUNY Council on Writing and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University The recent attention given to the topic of artificial intelligence has […]
In the last year, open foundation models have proliferated widely. Given the rapid adoption of these models, cultivating a responsible open source AI ecosystem is crucial and urgent. Our workshop presents an opportunity to learn from experts in different fields who have worked on responsible release strategies, risk mitigation, and policy interventions that can help.
If you use social media data in your research, you’re going to want to listen up, because we’ve reached a crisis point. Digital data access has survived in an uncomfortable and unpredictable flux for years, but the most recent wave of policy changes may well be existential.
As we face an increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday practices, it becomes more critical than ever to examine how AI affects our lives and society. Researchers in the social sciences and humanities have made essential observations and analyses on this topic. Yet, we still need grounded, situated, and relational understandings of how AI […]
This event is part of the Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the NULab at Northeastern University.
Online content moderators have a difficult and thankless job: delivering results and determining what you see on the web. But what do they actually do, and how do they do it? Hear from actual moderators who have served at some of the largest social media platforms in the world and are now at the forefront […]