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 […]