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 […]