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News on Credibility and Trust
On November 10, Ronald J. Deibert, renowned technology and security expert, will discuss the disturbing influence and impact of the internet on politics, the economy, the environment, and humanity. In his new book ‘Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society’, Deibert will explore how the expansion of society towards a system of surveillance capitalism has […]
On Wednesday, October 28th at 6:00pm ET, join us for the 30th annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics, delivered by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, with Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs moderating. As the 2020 election quickly approaches, are there similarities to 2016 or is this a continuation of an unprecedented cycle in political history? How has the […]
Imagine living in a society in which most of the land and buildings available for meeting and working were owned by a few for-profit corporations. Churches, governments, groups of friends, schools, nonprofits, and grassroots social movements would each have to reserve space on — or have a key to — a privately-owned facility, often on […]
In this talk, I explain what happens when human rights advocates try to change computer code, instead of legal code to protect human rights online. There is a growing chorus of policymakers and regulators calling on the tech sector to respect human rights and engage civil society, but very little empirical knowledge of what happens […]
Hardly a week goes by without another Facebook scandal. Frustration with Facebook and criticism of it — even despair over it and outright hatred of it — seems constant, evergreen. It’s been this way since at least the 2016 election. There are now more journalists investigating the world’s largest social network than ever before, exposing […]
By Joanne McNeilOn Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that the agency will seek to regulate social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter at the behest of the Trump administration’s executive order signed earlier this year. “Members of all three branches of the federal government have expressed serious concerns about the prevailing interpretation of the […]
By Makena KellyIn an era of social media bots, deepfakes and “alternative facts,” reliable news is more important than ever. Now, a citizen science project called Public Editor is asking volunteers to help suss out credible news through online analysis. With guidance and support, Public Editor volunteers evaluate sections of news articles for “reasoning errors” and other issues. […]
By Julia TraversFacebook’s fact-checking program relies on third-party fact-checking and news organizations to help weed out fake and misleading news on the platform. That limits the program from scaling up, since there are only so many organizations that do this work. But what if Facebook could use regular people — people whose day job is not fact-checking […]
By Laura Hazard Owen On May 18, 1864, U.S. troops marched into lower Manhattan and entered the offices of two key New York City newspapers. Soldiers leveled guns at staff members’ heads. They blocked the doors with bayonets. President Abraham Lincoln had ordered the arrest of the editors and the seizure of the newspapers. That particular May morning, the […]
By Elizabeth MitchellWithin minutes of President Trump announcing that he and first lady Melania Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, the interwebs were awash in speculation and conspiracy theories. Is Trump faking it so that he can pretend to have recovered and thus prove the virus isn’t dangerous? Or maybe he’s floating the story in order to […]
By Sean IllingEverybody celebrates the hope and promise; if you google “Covid and AI” you get something like 2.7 million hits. But it’s easy to gloss over the hype and the peril. If AI is built on data scaffolding that is tainted, flawed or distorted by systematic bias — or just the wrong starting points — those […]
By Joanne Kenen