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 […]