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 […]