On Wednesday, October 28th at 6:00pm ET, join us for the 30th annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics, delivered by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, with Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs moderating. As the 2020 election quickly approaches, are there similarities to 2016 or is this a continuation of an unprecedented cycle in political history? How has the […]
The 2016 US election made it clear that social media companies play a profound role in how voters are informed and influenced. What role should social media companies be playing in the upcoming US election? Join us for a timely and important discussion with two leading experts and YOUR questions in this highly-interaction livestream conversation. […]
The 2020 general election is unlike any other. Understanding how campuses can facilitate respectful and productive dialogue across political differences will be key during this tense time, but doing so virtually presents additional challenges. What can faculty, administrators, and staff do now to prepare for the difficult dialogues that lie ahead? Join Jonathan Friedman, director […]
Journalists and pundits have described political polarization as one of the foremost problems of our time. It has been ascribed to trends such as changing party compositions, racial and ethnic divisions, and the rise of partisan cable news. This seminar will present new research on social media and political polarization in both the United States […]
In this talk, I explain what happens when human rights advocates try to change computer code, instead of legal code to protect human rights online. There is a growing chorus of policymakers and regulators calling on the tech sector to respect human rights and engage civil society, but very little empirical knowledge of what happens […]
Imagine living in a society in which most of the land and buildings available for meeting and working were owned by a few for-profit corporations. Churches, governments, groups of friends, schools, nonprofits, and grassroots social movements would each have to reserve space on — or have a key to — a privately-owned facility, often on […]
Imagine living in a society in which most of the land and buildings available for meeting and working were owned by a few for-profit corporations. Churches, governments, groups of friends, schools, nonprofits, and grassroots social movements would each have to reserve space on — or have a key to — a privately-owned facility, often on […]
With the global onset of COVID-19, broadband access has never been more vital to our economies, democracies, and social well-being. The pandemic, however, painfully demonstrated the extent to which people in the United States are un- and under-connected. At least 42 million Americans lack access to broadband because of infrastructure availability, while upwards of 162 […]
The Oxford Internet Institute hosts Lisa Nakamura, lisanakamura.net, Director, Digital Studies Institute, Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor, Department of American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Nakamura is the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, and a writer focusing on digital media, race, and gender. We are living […]
On November 10, Ronald J. Deibert, renowned technology and security expert, will discuss the disturbing influence and impact of the internet on politics, the economy, the environment, and humanity. In his new book ‘Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society’, Deibert will explore how the expansion of society towards a system of surveillance capitalism has […]
Hate and harassment have proliferated online in recent years, posing serious threats to college and university faculty. Women, BIPOC, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community continue to be disproportionately targeted and intimidated, posing a threat to the equitable exchange of ideas in the public sphere. Many faculty have been left to fend for themselves, with […]
From scholarly article to practical guides, from textbooks to media, from weighty tomes to tweets, researchers and academic writers have many options today. While academic writers still write books and articles, forms and formats are changing. Electronic journals can include links to media, and increasingly open access journals make it easier to reach academics, professionals, […]
In many emerging economies, a significant mobile gender gap persists—in which women not only have less access to mobile internet and mobile money, but continue to lag in mobile phone ownership. Drawing on one of the first large-scale experimental studies of mobile phone ownership among women, we analyze the effects of reducing this gender gap. […]
Do digital platforms function as stealth media, a system that enables the deliberate operations of undisclosed political campaigns’ imperceptible targeting and furtive messaging? This talk presents empirical research on covert digital political campaigns sponsored by unidentifiable, untraceable groups. By utilizing a user-based, real-time ad tracking tool and “reverse engineering” techniques, independent from tech platforms, Kim’s […]
Following the publication of Data Justice and COVID-19: Global Perspectives, the Oxford Internet Institute is hosting a discussion among leading experts to reflect on the enduring lessons for technological governance following from the pandemic. Edited by Linnet Taylor, Gargi Sharma, Aaron Martin and Shazade Jameson, Data Justice and COVID-19 is a unique collection of 38 […]
Since 2014 there have been at least 74 nation-state led online influence campaigns targeting other countries through deceptive social media, with 21 of those in 2019 alone. How are such foreign influence efforts organized, what sets their content apart from legitimate social media activity, and what have we learned about their potential impact? Much as […]
Event Listing Header Algorithms touch each and every aspect of modern democratic life. While technology has created some ease, there has also been friction and harms, often in discrete or invisible ways and most disproportionately impacted women and communities of color. Our hyper digital lives during this pandemic has only reinforced the urgency for algorithmic […]
Once relegated to the fringes of only the most paranoid online communities, today the QAnon conspiracy theory has followers and supporters on an international scale, going so far as to be endorsed by a number of political candidates and one elected member of Congress. The fanatical far-right theory combines allegations of child sex-trafficking by Satan-worshipping […]
Once relegated to the fringes of only the most paranoid online communities, today the QAnon conspiracy theory has followers and supporters on an international scale, going so far as to be endorsed by a number of political candidates and one elected member of Congress. The fanatical far-right theory combines allegations of child sex-trafficking by Satan-worshipping […]
CEREN BUDAK, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SCHOOL OF INFORMATION The spread of political misinformation threatens the health of our democracies and weakens the legitimacy and public trust in the established political and media institutions. In this talk I will examine the spread of this threat, focusing primarily on the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections […]
You might think that something like a search engine allows for equal access to information. Yet looking deeper into how we discover things, there’s a culture of racism and sexism impacting what we find. Based on over 6 years of academic research, Safiya Umoja Noble’s book looks into the internet’s biases and how it acts […]