Event Listing Header Prof. Kate Crawford is a leading scholar who has spent the last decade studying the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She holds the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, is a senior principal researcher at MSR, and an Honorary Professor at the University […]
On suddenly sparse streets, artists confront the grim reality of the moment. With a nod to the anti-globalization movement or the music notes seemingly playing off the guest that has overstayed its welcome, both messages diagnose the ailment and gesture toward a hope for and belief in change. In a moment shaped by closures — […]
Is environmental justice finally getting more coverage, as media outlets address the disproportionate impact of serious environmental problems on communities of color, the poor and the marginalized? Three leading journalists will discuss the challenges ahead in covering environmental and climate justice in the United States and around the globe: Somini Sengupta of The New York Times; Justin Worland of Time Magazine; […]
The Edgelands Institute is an interdisciplinary pop-up institute to redraw our social contract in our era of mass-urbanization, surveillance, pandemics, and other emergencies, currently being incubated at the Berkman Klein Center. The Institute stems from the perception that the rapid deployment of surveillance technologies in cities to provide security services is reshaping how we interact […]
Event Meta end author Event content The consequences of disinformation came into sharp relief in the coordinated and violent attack on the United States Capitol on January 6th. Social media platforms intensify the speed of misleading communication that promoted lies, misrepresentations, and deceptive sourcing to energize groups. This was a concerted and organized campaign to […]
The Ten Years Hence speaker series explores issues, ideas, and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade. Students, faculty, and the community use guest speaker comments as a springboard for structured speculation about emerging issues and the next ten years.
Increased visibility is arguably the most significant affordance of social media and a large body of scholarly work has sought to understand how individuals deal with the effects increased visibility in terms of concern for privacy as well as the ability to broadcast to wide audiences. Much of this work explores how pre-social media norms […]
Using examples of political advertising, including some of his own work in nearly 30 years of creating such content as a campaign consultant, Craig Snyder will explore the cumulative effects on the American political system, and on American society more broadly, of four standard techniques in modern American political communications: The use of half-truths in […]
The Ten Years Hence speaker series explores issues, ideas, and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade. Students, faculty, and the community use guest speaker comments as a springboard for structured speculation about emerging issues and the next ten years.
A revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online–and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social media In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to […]
As our H2020 project is close to its end-date, we would like to invite you to the event ‘Countering disinformation: strategies, policies, research’, that we are organising online, on Wednesday April 21st 2021, at 14.00-18.30 CET, in order to discuss the latest developments in the field of disinformation and the present activities that are geared […]
From surveillance and misinformation to facial recognition and foreign influence, advances in Artificial Intelligence have been rapid, raising questions about potential and impact on the rights of people around the globe. Join the AI and Human Rights Forum to hear from some of the world’s top experts on disinformation, online hate and freedom of speech, […]
Part of the Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the NULab at Northeastern University. Dannagal G. Young (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is a Professor of Communication and Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware where she studies the content, audience, and effects of non-traditional political information. She has authored over […]
This is the first day of a virtual workshop to identify key issues for consideration in the reexamination of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 provides Internet-based technology companies and social media platforms with immunity from civil liability for hosting user-generated content and in the removal or moderation of user-generated content. While […]
A planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will convene a workshop to discuss whether protections provided to Internet-based technology companies and social media platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 should be reconsidered in light of increasing online misinformation and abuse. The workshop will examine […]
Panel Discussion: Media scholars and experts on how to combat the rise of hate and the disinformation that spreads it. How can we learn from lessons of the past to stop hate movements today? What role does the media play in stopping the spread of hateful ideologies? How are disinformation and media manipulation used as […]
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin explores a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity — what she terms the “New Jim Code.” This presentation […]
How can feminist methodologies and approaches be applied and be transformative when developing AI and ADM systems? How can AI innovation and social systems innovation be catalysed concomitantly to create a positive movement for social change larger than the sum of the data science or social science parts? How can we produce actionable research that […]
Users’ perspectives on what f*ke news and misinformation is and isn’t, who drives it, and where people say they see it are important for understanding the scale and scope of public concern, and how this corresponds with research insights and aligns with proposed responses to these problems, as well as for the credibility and even […]
In December 2020, it was first reported that SolarWinds, a major US information technology firm, experienced a massive cyberattack which affected up to 18,000 clients, including numerous US government agencies and Fortune 500 companies whose networks and data were exposed and vulnerable for months. Described by Microsoft’s president Brad Smith, one of the affected clients, […]
f–field f–eyebrow f–field f–page-title cc–component-container cc–intro Artificial Intelligence and autonomous systems are poised to transform the practice of espionage. This “revolution in intelligence affairs” will lead to machines serving as more than just tools for collection and analysis, but as intelligence consumers, decision-makers, and targets of intelligence operations. Former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Chief Technology Officer […]
This 1 hour online panel discussion to mark the 20th Anniversary of the OII brings together a unique gathering of the current and former Directors of the OII. Given their experience in leading the helm of the Institute they will reflect on what the OII has achieved and what pressing technology challenges this community can […]
The Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington is planning a virtual workshop, “Challenges and Considerations for Misinformation Research,” on May 6 that will bring together academic teams researching mis- and disinformation to reflect on research best practices, data ethics and hurdles, and the normative and epistemological foundations of our collective work. The CIP invites academic […]
Can humanitarian actors play a more intentional role in designing just and equitable digital futures? Could we, in fact, design worlds that don’t imagine some figures, particularly populations that we serve in the global south, to merely be passive beneficiaries and outside of the borders of expertise we seek? Instead of looking at digital governance […]
Facts took a bit of a beating in 2020. Let’s turn the page and celebrate the truth! United Facts of America, brought to you by PolitiFact and the Poynter Institute, is a celebration of fact-checking featuring some of the most important voices in media, health care, politics and technology. Over 10 hours of virtual programming, […]
Reimagine the Internet is a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over […]
This January, to celebrate the fifth year of the Assembly program, we invited five ongoing alumni project teams to return (virtually) to the Berkman Klein Center to participate in the Assembly Project Fellowship. These projects address the variety of topics that Assembly has tackled since its inception in 2017, including the ethics and governance of […]
Rapidly developing technologies can be an unprecedented force for good, but too often codify and amplify existing forms of racial inequality, discrimination, and bias. This free, online conference brings together researchers, policymakers, technologists, and advocates to address technology’s new threats to racial equity and new tools for a more just future. The conference is sponsored […]
Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism. His research covers two major areas of scholarship: 1) political expression through digital media and 2) data science and computational methods for analyzing large digital datasets. He has authored or co-authored more than 30 journal articles, book chapters and public reports, in […]
In the wake of heightened online radicalization over the past several years, including the rise of far-right nationalism, violence, and harms to democracy globally, it is clear that technology platforms are playing an outsized role in amplifying racialized disinformation and fomenting real world consequences. As lawmakers and civil society grapple with the policy and legal […]
While the last year has seen broad-based calls for racial equity in the United States, protests often don’t always translate into policy outcomes. On Episode 41 of “The Future of Democracy,” Knight’s Evette Alexander will take a deep dive into how racial attitudes affect American political preferences with Dr. David C. Wilson, incoming dean of […]
In this seminar Dr. Krafft will report on a mixed methods study of the North American Flat Earther community, drawing on documents from two Flat Earth Society websites, three surveys, and participant observation at the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference. Across the three surveys they find that around 20-30% of respondents are at least to […]
You’ve seen it. That meme that seems just too good to be true. That outlandish story your family member prefaced with, “Can you believe he said that?” followed by a video link of unknown origin and vintage. We are in an era of misinformation — and even disinformation, when someone intentionally disseminates false or misleading […]
The trial of Derek Chauvin sparked national conversations about violent policing and racial injustice. In its wake, how should policy makers, police, and journalists respond? The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb (Spring 2018 Shorenstein Writer in Residence) and BBC correspondent Tara McKelvey (Fall 2012 Shorenstein Fellow) — who both covered the trial from Minneapolis — will join […]
The rise of social media platforms has introduced another widespread phenomenon—the spread of misleading information. Whether introduced organically or deliberately, misinformation threatens the integrity of democratic journalism. Because misinformation has become a serious threat to governance, it requires interdisciplinary efforts and collaboration to mitigate. To this end, Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) researches […]
The media has long played an important role in a healthy democracy, providing citizens with access to accurate news and information that allows them to effectively participate in democratic processes. However, the growing threat from deepfakes and disinformation, from both foreign and domestic sources, threatens to overwhelm the ability of individuals to discern fact from […]
A discussion exploring the critical role that grassroots organizing and field-building must play in 2021 and beyond to address mis/disinformation with a particular focus on mobilizing communities of color. This webinar will explore how grassroots groups and communities of color can shape US federal policy and hold lawmakers accountable, the importance of grassroots pressure on […]
The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, part of The University of Manchester, holds the entire archive of the Manchester Guardian. In this series of events to mark our bicentenary, our panels of special guests and experts will each discuss an item from the archive, its relevance to today’s news and media, and how it […]
Event Listing Header Rights x Tech is a space is for leaders in technology, movement and philanthropy who understand the importance of hearing from practitioners and leaders who understand how tech is touching all of our lives. We host monthly forums that are focused on sourcing innovation from the innovators already among us. Our upcoming […]
The IDeaS Summer Institute is an intense, hands-on training camp that teaches participants about the theories, methods, and tools to identify and combat disinformation, hate speech, and extremism online. This institute is aimed at graduate students, faculty, and personnel from industry, education and government who want to learn more about social-cybersecurity, an emerging field of […]
Over the last few years, misinformation has dominated our digital landscape. From email to social media to “news sites,” adults are inundated with images and information that have been manipulated, taken out of context or completely fabricated! Don’t feel frustrated! Fight back! While you may not have been born a digital native, you certainly can […]
Join Bergen LEADER, Maria Deptula for a seminar on misinformation, disinformation, bias and “fake news”. Maria Deptula will help attendees uncover how we can categorize information based on its provenance, recognize our selective preferences, and learn new sources we can refer to when in doubt.
As long as politics and elections have existed, there have always been false claims and exaggerations by leaders, candidates, their backers and even commentators. But the explosion of Internet access and social media usage in recent years has turned aberrational misinformation into a global epidemic of disinformation. On the one hand, millions more people have […]
The webinar offers a nuanced look into disinformation campaigns and presents a researcher’s perspective on these phenomena. Join us for a presentation followed by a Q&A session, in which Dr. Ahmer Arif will talk about human-centered responses to disinformation that go beyond mere fact checking. In this webinar, we will discuss how our social computing […]
This discussion will explore the scope of US federal policy solutions available to mitigate the spread of mis/disinformation online. This will include a discussion of the viability of Section 230 reform and other proposed regulations and how the Biden Administration is approaching platform policy. This briefing will not only cover the scope of these issues, […]
Disinformation and misinformation have been broadly recognized among major modern threats. They affect societies and the functioning of democracies all over the world and, with the profusion of communication channels and advances in digital technology, they spread rapidly and threaten public goods, risk increased polarization in societies and limit the fundamental freedom to hold opinions […]
Natural disasters, elections, climate changes, insurrections, pandemics, and new technologies are rocking the world. People talk about events, both these massive ones and much smaller ones, on line. Social media platforms, search engines and websites have become the window through which these events are viewed and interpreted. Those on social media seek and shape information, […]
The expansion of access to information through the internet, and the rise of almost unlimited sources of news and opinion has given rise to an unprecedented spread of disinformation and misrepresentation about marginalized and oppressed populations that negatively impacts young and old alike.
How is social media changing democracy? How are computer algorithms employed to tailor messaging for narrow groups of voters? What are the effects of disinformation campaigns? This session examines ways in which media is manipulated to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society.
Join the Stanford Internet Observatory for a conversation with US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, where he will discuss slowing the spread of health misinformation, both during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Health misinformation is a major threat to public health because it can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Although […]
Do you feel like you and those around you are swimming in a soup of disinformation and lies? Why is this happening? How can anyone believe this stuff? What can you do to help pop the bubble and bring people back to reality? Join us as we break down: – How to identify disinformation – […]
A discussion on how platform research to address mis/disinformation should be approached through a race-based lens, new platform research solutions and methods being pioneered and utilized by researchers of color, the unique challenges researches of color face, and how philanthropy can better support and empower Black and Brown tech platform researchers to carry out their […]
The Chinese leadership has put artificial intelligence front and center in China’s industrial development. As part of this strategy, they have established: 1. Industry alliances—collaboration platforms involving local governments, academic institutions, and companies; and 2. Government guidance funds—public-private investment vehicles that mobilize massive amounts of capital in support of strategic and emerging technologies. CSET’s Ngor […]
The Flat Earth Society. The Illuminati. QAnon. Sometimes it seems like conspiracy theories have been multiplying exponentially, especially in this time of global pandemic. Why do we gravitate toward conspiracy theories to make sense of the world? What human need do these stories fill? In this program, we’ll explore some conspiracy theories old and new, […]
Jessica J. González is Co-CEO of Free Press, an organization dedicated to “saving net neutrality, achieving affordable internet access for all, uplifting the voices of people of color in the media, challenging old and new media gatekeepers to serve the public interest, ending unwarranted surveillance, defending press freedom and reimagining local journalism.” González has worked […]
As digitization increasingly shapes the scope of U.S. international trade, regulations and policies regarding cross-border data transfers carry significant economic implications. Yet—as the recent invalidation of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) demonstrates—trade, economic competitiveness, and free flows of data can come into tension with privacy and […]
Team AI4Dignity is organizing a two-day collaborative coding event with fact checkers, AI developers and academic researchers to improve machine learning models to flag and label online extreme speech with Public plenary and panels How can AI assisted systems contribute to online extreme speech moderation? How do we envision collaborative endeavors in AI assisted moderation […]
Do you have an idea about how to improve commitment to democratic principles that you would like us to test? Join the challenge! American democracy is under threat. Many Americans are willing to compromise on democratic principles for partisan goals. Some are even willing to resort to violence to help their side win. Extreme dislike […]
As communities continue to rebuild and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, how can they harness the lessons they’ve learned in the past year to build resiliency and prepare for future challenges? At the 2021 Knight Smart Cities Lab, we’ll help community leaders and technologists explore how to leverage federal funding, data and digital technology to […]
In May of 2020, the Navajo Nation reported one of the highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rates in the United States. But even the dire official numbers didn’t tell the full story. The Native American Journalists Association’s Indigenous Investigative Collective brought together three newsrooms to launch a public records campaign to dig into how a mix […]
The news industry in the United States is grappling with many serious and simultaneous challenges, including massive declines in the number of staff and outlets, perceptions of bias and blame for increasing political polarization, and displacement by opinion and even disinformation. Growing numbers of communities lack any local news, and online platforms draw ad revenues […]
This workshop starts from the premise that the problem of online misinformation is a symptom, not a cause. While undeniably problematic, misinformation is the current cause célèbre of a larger class of pathological dynamics that have emerged in our evolving digital media ecosystems and cause harm at different systemic levels. These dynamics are exacerbated by […]
The fourth annual Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) conference will take place virtually August 9 – 13 between 11 am – 3 pm EDT. Register now at http://pacss.eventbrite.com. The registration fee of $20 will help us cover conference expenses. We are dedicated to keeping this conference open and accessible and we ask that you […]
Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement’s annual conference celebrating the free knowledge projects made possible by the volunteer community and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation – Commons, MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary – with three days of conferences, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. Hundreds of volunteers and Free Knowledge leaders from around the world gather to discuss issues, report on new projects and […]
The events of 2020 have demonstrated the power of disinformation and its effect on the public’s perceptions. New technologies, such as the broad adoption and availability of Artificial Intelligence, will continue to blur the lines between what is real and what is fake. Instant access to global platforms has resulted in a proliferation of conspiracy […]
Humans are now able to access information through more channels than ever before, exposing us to potentially dangerous conspiracy theories and deliberate disinformation campaigns. How and why does misinformation start? And what can we do to slow or stop its viral online spread? Join our panel of experts as they discuss ways to encourage […]
In this conversation, Duncan Watts and Danaë Metaxa will discuss Metaxa’s research using algorithm audits to measure gender and racial bias in online services such as Google Images. In addition to exploring the relevance of Metaxa’s work to algorithmic systems, the discussion will also touch on the importance of reconciling the sometimes competing epistemic values […]
A discussion on how platform research to address mis/disinformation should be approached through a race-based lens, new platform research solutions and methods being pioneered and utilized by researchers of color, the unique challenges researchers of color face, and how philanthropy can better support and empower Black and Brown tech platform researchers to carry out their […]
In Visions of Beirut, Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images has shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces the histories of how the technologies and media infrastructure that […]
Oxford Internet Institute presents ‘A new Bretton Woods for Data’. A conversation with Elizabeth Denham CBE, UK Information Commissioner and Global Privacy Assembly chair. Here is the paradox: as data protection laws increasingly align towards a high standard, data protectionism is on the rise too. Ever more countries are establishing stricter rules on the cross-border […]
In this talk, Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante, University of Arizona journalism professor, will discuss how research involving historical newspapers, including those in the National Digital Newspaper Program, contributes to better understanding of the Mexico-United States borderlands and beyond. Her talk will consider how interdisciplinary and cross border collaborations with libraries, librarians, and media scholars […]
Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine and technology with a focus […]
With the growing risk of the fragmentation of the international digital ecosystem, prioritizing digital transformation has never been more important for Japan. The country’s digital transformation will largely determine its ability to adjust to profound demographic changes brought on by an ageing and contracting population, find new sources of competitiveness and drivers for productivity at […]
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 […]
Event Listing Header Join the Forum on Microbial Threats for an exciting virtual conversation about what we’ve learned from 15 months of living through a global pandemic. The workshop will broadly examine responses to COVID-19 in the U.S. and abroad, and will host retrospective and prospective discussions on the broad impacts of the pandemic on […]
Media in Afghanistan flourished over the past twenty years, with independent, politically-affiliated, and internationally-supported media networks providing local, national, and international news as well as entertainment. Since the Taliban re-took control of the country in August, 2021, thousands of journalists have fled the country, and many news and media organizations have shut their doors. Spring […]
Defender of democracy, activist for women’s rights, and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, Amy Siskind is best known as the author of The Weekly List and as President of The New Agenda, a non-profit dedicated to the advancement of women. On Twitter she is @Amy_Siskind. Jay Rosen has been teaching journalism at New York University […]
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 […]
TPRC is the preeminent annual interdisciplinary conference on communications, information, and Internet policy that convenes researchers and policymakers from law, economics, engineering, computer science, public policy, data science, social sciences, and related fields working in academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations around the world. TPRC is seeking submissions for its 52nd conference, including papers, posters, […]
This event marks the launch of the Leverhulme Trust funded parents’ news use project – which runs from the fall of 2023 to the fall of 2025. The Leverhulme News Use project aims to examine how parents engage with and respond to news at critical moments of crisis. The project team includes Professor Ranjana Das, Dr Thomas Roberts, […]
Call for Papers: Rethinking the Inevitability of AI: The Environmental and Social Impacts of Computing in Historical Context April 22, 2024: 300-500 word paper proposals due July 18, 2024: Date of online conference In late 2023, news broke that Microsoft was looking into developing nuclear reactors to power their forays into AI. According to the […]
Join Good Systems at UT Austin for its fourth annual symposium exploring the future of human-centered, values-driven artificial intelligence. Connect with an interdisciplinary and cross-sector community of faculty leaders, researchers, students, professionals, and civic leaders to discuss the most pressing opportunities and challenges in Ethical AI. The Good Systems Symposium is the signature annual event […]
21st century media pose challenges to preserving the historical record. Collecting institutions need guidance and new strategies in order to save selective cellphone video, GPS data, and video from surveillance cameras, drones, and police bodycams. In this Talk, Howard Besser will discuss how saving this type of material poses procedural, policy, and privacy issues. And […]
Latinos are the largest racial and ethnic group in the United States, comprising more than 60 million people. Yet, researchers know comparatively little about the information Latinos consume online, and how it shapes their political attitudes and beliefs. This limits the ability for multiple stakeholders — ranging from the academic community to national nonprofits to […]
Hosted by The University of Texas at Austin’s Good Systems’ “Designing Responsible AI Technologies to Protect Information Integrity” research team, this virtual event brings together researchers and thought leaders working across disciplines and sectors, focusing on developing AI tools for use by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers. The event will feature three keynote talks and a panel […]
The Smart Cities and Generative AI Symposium is a day-long gathering of interdisciplinary professionals across academia and industry to inform, examine, and discuss how generative artificial intelligence impacts our cities. Happening in the Avaya Auditorium on the University of Texas at Austin main campus, this robust program will feature presenters from multiple universities across Texas […]
The future of the Internet is (in) the cloud. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), rather than platforms like X or Meta, will become the tech industry’s most powerful players. To the extent this is not already the case, the choices of these cloud companies will influence what our wired world looks like, […]
In May 2024, the Internet Democracy Initiative will host an Internet and Society Conference at the Northeastern University-London campus. Like the IDI, the conference will focus on the role of the internet in structuring democracy, society, and markets with emphasis on areas that have widespread information and social media implications. Conference sessions will feature academic, […]
In this talk, we present a methodological outlook for empirical and historical studies of platforms, emphasizing their unique characteristics like programmability and multisidedness. We explore how web archives play a critical role in preserving bits of their past. Despite the challenges posed by the ephemerality and continuous updates of platforms, we show how web archives […]
Strange as it may seem, Big Tech has become feminist. Meta has a team devoted to women’s safety. Venmo monitors its app for gender-based discrimination. Bumble aspires to make misogyny illegal. And it’s not just talk: Big Tech is putting its money where its mouth is, devoting significant time and resources to achieving a feminist […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming every aspect of society, from education and work to health care and finance. Its widespread adoption also has started to impact global politics, from elections to international conflict. The tradeoffs between AI’s positive and more harmful effects are still being debated. While AI could allow transformative advances in scientific discovery […]
The Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy SEPTEMBER 20-21, 2024 WASHINGTON COLLEGE OF LAW, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON, D.C. TPRC promotes interdisciplinary thinking on current and emerging issues in communications and the Internet by disseminating and discussing new research relevant to policy questions in the U.S. and around the world. It serves researchers, policymakers, […]
The George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and the Researcher Support Consortium invite you to join them for Addressing Researcher Harassment: A Fireside Chat and Panel Discussion to Launch New Research Support Tools.
The Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research invite you to a memorial service for CrowdTangle, a tool that offered thousands around the globe the ability to analyze real time trends in the information people were sharing. Meta eliminated CrowdTangle on August 14, 2024, in the middle of a year in which […]
Book Talk and Panel with Chris Robé – “Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression”
Misinformation has been a problem for all of human history, but is particularly challenging to control on today’s social media platforms. Under the current US Section 230 regulation, internet companies are not held responsible for the content shared on their platforms. Other countries have taken different approaches to regulation. With a shared goal to maintain […]
Women of color candidates continue to be underrepresented in Congress while also facing significant challenges in running for office. One of these challenges includes the kinds of offensive and hate speech they are subject to on social media platforms. In this research briefing, we will share findings from a new study conducted by the Online Violence […]
For decades, America has seen a steady decline in trust in institutions — in government, science, media, and even the very idea of democracy. The problem stems from several places, such as rising political polarization and declining civic participation. But many place the blame on our increasingly siloed and partisan information environment, which is exacerbated […]
The alarming rise of mis- and disinformation influencing recent elections spurred a flurry of new research to understand the trend. But work among academics, nonprofits and the technology sector made some activists suspicious that a conspiracy was developing to muzzle conservative and right-wing ideas – leading to a campaign to curb research. In these polarized […]
Since ChatGPT first launched nearly two years ago, many have claimed the rise of AI would pose a significant threat to elections. Reports warned that a surge of AI-generated disinformation could undermine democracy. Intelligence officials worried that foreign actors would use AI to disrupt the electoral process. Americans agreed, with more than half saying AI could impact who will win in November.
Join us for “Media Coverage of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: The View from Germany and the United States,” a Fireside Chat hosted by the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, in partnership with UNC Global Affairs, Thomas Mann House Los Angeles, and the UNC Center for European Studies, and co-sponsored by the UNC School of Information and Library […]
General-purpose AI systems are now deployed to billions of users, but they pose risks related to bias, fraud, privacy, copyright, CBRN, NCII, and more. To assess these risks, we need independent and community-driven evaluations, audits and red teaming, and responsible disclosure. Our workshop on the future of third-party AI evaluation dives into these topics with experts on: Third-party evaluations, […]
This talk will be a reflection on Robyn Caplan’s multi-perspective approach to studying platforms, and will highlight the importance of triangulation when it comes to studying networked actors. This talk will give an overview of Caplan’s research (touching on research on platform personnel, media associations, online creators, civil society actors) and will explore the theoretical […]
Join the Center for Media at Risk and the Center on Digital Culture and Society for a symposium examining the relationship between social media and the academy.
In this panel, we talk to three online content creators who do journalistic work about how their work is both alike and different than mainstream journalism, how they engage with audiences and what traditional journalists can learn from them.
Social media platforms have become increasingly opaque at precisely the moment their influence on society has reached unprecedented levels. Over the long-term, we need to conceptualize true independent transparency as an infrastructure project built on four pillars—government requirements & legal protections, international standards, shared tooling, and sustainable funding. We are making slow but steady progress […]