The Program on Platform Regulation focuses on current or emerging law governing Internet platforms, with an emphasis on laws’ consequences for the rights and interests of Internet users and the public.
The Stanford Internet Observatory is a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media.
The Stanford Social Media Lab works on understanding psychological and interpersonal processes in social media. The team specializes in using computational linguistics and behavioral experiments to understand how the words we use can reveal psychological and social dynamics, such as deception and trust, emotional dynamics, and relationships.
The Program on Democracy and the Internet seeks to promote research, convenings, and courses that engage with the challenges new technologies pose to democracy in the digital age.
The mission of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center is to inspire policy and governance innovations that reinforce democratic values, universal human rights, and the rule of law in the digital realm.
The Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies aims to build a path for future research and policymaking in order to explore the impacts of emerging technologies on democratic governance, rule of law, and socioeconomic inequality.
Mail-in voting has come under partisan scrutiny, but according to Stanford research, it does not appear to benefit one political party over the other. However, challenges to mail-in and absentee voting remain as states and voters make a shift this November.
Alex Feerst, one of the great thinkers about Internet content moderation, has a revealing metaphor about the real-world work involved. “You might go into it thinking that online information flows are best managed by someone with the equivalent of a PhD in hydrology,” he says. “But you quickly discover that what you really need are plumbers.”
On May 28th, President Trump signed an executive order threatening to revoke CDA 230 protections, which would expose social media companies to increased liability for content that is posted on their sites. The Cyber Policy Center team responded on June 1 in a public webinar. The event was recorded.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the effects could be potentially devastating to global democracy and the upcoming U.S. election. On the World Class podcast, Larry Diamond and Nathaniel Persily discuss what needs to be done to ensure a healthy election in November with host Michael McFaul.
