The Stanford Internet Observatory will host analysts from the Virality Project to discuss the project’s findings from a year of observation and analysis on COVID-19 vaccine conversations online. The final report, “Memes, Magnets and Microchips: Narrative dynamics around COVID-19 vaccines,” will be available on February 24.
Join report contributors Renée DiResta, Kaitlyn Dowling, Cameron Hickey, Lily Meyersohn and Chase Small along with special guest Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative as they discuss the dynamics and impact of misleading information targeting the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Stanford Internet Observatory will host analysts from the Virality Project to discuss the project’s findings from a year of observation and analysis on COVID-19 vaccine conversations online. The final report, “Memes, Magnets and Microchips: Narrative dynamics around COVID-19 vaccines,” will be available on February 24.
Join report contributors Renée DiResta, Kaitlyn Dowling, Cameron Hickey, Lily Meyersohn and Chase Small along with special guest Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative as they discuss the dynamics and impact of misleading information targeting the COVID-19 vaccines.
Renée DiResta is the former Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.
You can see a full list of Renée's writing and speeches on her website: www.reneediresta.com or follow her @noupside.
Former Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
The Stanford Internet Observatory will host a symposium, Cryptocurrency and Societal Harm, at Stanford University on Friday, May 13, 2022. We invite academic researchers and practitioners to apply to attend and/or present. Relevant topics for the symposium include cryptocurrency-related crime, tracing illegally-obtained cryptocurrency, ransomware attacks, mixing services and privacy coins, and national and international regulations for cryptocurrency businesses. To apply, please fill out the following form by March 28, 2022. We plan to hold this event in person, although we may be able to accommodate a few presenters virtually. Please direct questions about this call to Karen Nershi (nershi@stanford.edu), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Join us on Tuesday, February 22 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for a panel discussion on “The Policy Implications of Web3”, featuring Tomicah Tillemann of KRH Partners, Cory Doctorow of Craphound.com, and Michèle Finck of the University of Tübinge in conversation with Marietje Schaake of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
The year 2021 marked an important moment for web3. Proponents believe the potential of web3 to democratize, decentralize and improve the internet is huge. Others argue that evangelists have yet to deliver results, and that web3 will inevitably tend towards centralization. Few however have explored the policy and political implications of the concept: how should regulators approach a potential web3 explosion? How should lawmakers think about the wider internet infrastructure? Is web3 an opportunity to reimagine the internet, or will it present even more challenges to policymakers? This webinar will explore these angles and foster a reflection on public policy by leading technologists and academics. The session is open to the public, but registration is required.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Image
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Image
Dr. Michèle Finck is Professor of Law and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Tübingen, an Affiliated Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich and the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London as well as a Visiting Professor at LUISS University in Rome. She previously worked at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.
Image
Dr. Tomicah Tillemann is a partner and Global Chief Policy Officer at KRH Partners, a new crypto venture fund led by former a16z General Partner Katie Haun, where he builds public policy architecture to support the next generation of the Internet. Until recently, he was the Global Head of Policy for an arm of Andreessen Horowitz. He worked in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, MIT, and governments around the world to develop a new generation of open source technology platforms to power the public sector. He also oversaw the work of the Blockchain Trust Accelerator and the Responsible Asset Allocator Initiative.
Image
Marietje Schaake (Moderator) is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs, and technology policies. Marietje is an (Advisory) Board Member with a number of nonprofits including MERICS, ECFR, ORF and AccessNow. She writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and a bi-weekly column for the Dutch NRC newspaper.
Join us on Tuesday, February 15 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for Demand-Driven Ideology on YouTube in the 2020 Election and Beyond featuring Kevin Munger of Penn State University in conversation with Nate Persily of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
"YouTube Politics" has evolved considerably over the past decade. Expanding on a supply-and-demand framework, we argue that the changing composition of the audience and the wider political ecosystem influences what videos get created and by whom. Of particular interest is the emergence of a second dimension, largely orthogonal to the traditional left-right divide: the pro- / anti-establishment dimension. The movement of some portion of American citizens across the first dimension towards the anti-establishment pole during the 2000s and 2010s was observed and responded to by media and political entrepreneurs. We chart this process at large scale during the 2020 US Presidential Election campaign and throughout 2021. Using data from nearly three thousand channels who discuss US Politics and a quarter-billion comments left on their videos, we plot the ideological space of YouTube Politics and argue for the insufficiency of a unidimensional model of US politics on YouTube, online, and in general.
About the Speakers:
Image
Kevin Munger is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. Kevin's research focuses on the implications of the internet and social media for the communication of political information. His specialty is the investigation of the economics of online media; current research models "Clickbait Media" and uses digital experiments to test the implications of these models on consumers of political information.
Image
Moderator: Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.
What can be done consistent with the First Amendment to ensure that American voters can make informed election decisions and hold free elections amid a flood of virally spread disinformation and the collapse of local news reporting? How should American society counter the actions of people like former President Donald J. Trump, who used social media to convince millions of his followers to doubt the integrity of U.S. elections and helped foment a violent insurrection? What can we do to minimize disinformation campaigns aimed at suppressing voter turnout?Join us on March 8 for a book talk with author Rick Hasen, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine in discussion with Cyber Policy Center co-director, Nate Persily on Rick’s newly released book, Cheap Speech.
Note the publisher is offering a 30% discount with code YECS30. Visit yalebooks.com for purchase.
About the Speaker:
Image
Professor Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and is Co-Director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies. He served in 2020 as a CNN Election Law Analyst. From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions. Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013, and one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California in 2005 and 2016 by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.
Join us on Tuesday, February 8 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “The Quantum Age” featuring Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director, Center for Long–Term Cybersecurity at UC Berkeley, and Zahra Takhshid, University of Denver Sturm College of Law in conversation with Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
Quantum technologies have provided capabilities that seem strange, are powerful, and at times, frightening. These capabilities are so different from our conventional intuition that they seem to ride the fine border between science fiction and fantasy—yet some quantum technologies can be commercially purchased today, and more are just around the corner. This discussion will explore the different kinds of quantum technologies and their legal, political, and social implications and, more broadly, the ways we can think about regulating the fast growing ecosystem of emerging technologies.
About the Speakers:
Chris Hoofnagle
Chris Jay Hoofnagle is Professor of Law in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where he teaches cybersecurity, programming for lawyers and torts. He is an affiliated faculty member with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, a Professor of Practice in the School of Information, and a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Hoofnagle’s new book with Simson Garfinkel, Law and Policy for the Quantum Age is now available (open access) from Cambridge University Press, which also published his first book, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy (2016). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Hoofnagle is of counsel to Gunderson Dettmer LLP, and serves on boards for Constella Intelligence and Palantir Technologies.
Zahra Takhshid
Zahra Takhshid is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Before joining DU, she was the Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School where she taught “Common Law and Privacy Torts.” Zahra is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and has been selected as the 2021 Quantum Fellow at the Center for Quantum Networks of the University of Arizona in partnership with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She teaches and writes about torts, privacy, technology and the law. A second strand of her interest is comparative and Islamic law. Zahra’s research has been published or is forthcoming in Cardozo Law Review, Minnesota Law Review Online, UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near. Eastern Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology, among others.
Image
Moderator: Kelly Born is the Director of the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She leads a ten-year, $130 million grantmaking effort that aims to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policymaking. Previously, Kelly was executive director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Prior to that, she was a Program Officer for the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, an 8-year, $150 million portfolio focused on improving U.S. democracy. Kelly oversaw Madison’s grantmaking on campaigns and elections, and digital disinformation. Before that, Kelly worked as a strategy consultant with the Monitor Institute, a nonprofit consulting firm, where she supported strategic planning efforts at a number of foundations. Earlier in her career, she consulted with nonprofits, the private sector, and governments in the United States, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
Join us on Tuesday, February 1st from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for Algorithmic Newsfeeds and Elections featuring one of our postdoctoral scholars, Alessandro Vecchiato. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
While personalization algorithms are ubiquitous online, their impact on public opinion and voting behavior is still largely unknown. This talk looks at this question by presenting results from a globally replicable, lab-in-the-field experiment with a custom-developed news app. We evaluate the impact of personalized news feed on news consumption, public opinion, turnout, and voting behavior. The results show that personalization significantly skews the news consumption of politically extreme users while allowing most other users to maintain a moderate news diet. However, personalized news feeds are shown to reinforce pre-existing beliefs for all users, including a demobilizing effect for unlikely voters. While our effects are small due to design constraints, our findings call for more transparency and regulation on platforms.
The session is open to the public, but registration is required.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Image
Alessandro Vecchiato is a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from New York University in May 2019. His work looks at internet technologies' role in shaping political beliefs and electoral outcomes. In his dissertation, he uses primarily experimental methods to study how algorithmic personalization in social media news feeds affects the beliefs and preferences of voters. In other work, he investigated how internet-mediated communication through social media has affected politicians' relationships with voters.
Image
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.
Join us on Tuesday, January 25 from 12 PM - 1 PM PTfor “Inclusive Content Moderation Is Innovative Content Moderation” featuring Aerica Shimizu Banks, founder of Shiso in conversation with Julie Owono, executive director of the Content Policy and Society Lab. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
Content moderation policies are perhaps the most scrutinized aspects of online platform operations, and are implicated in the most urgent current and political events globally. And yet, companies struggle to meet the moment, in part because of historical ignorance of a foundational component to adaptive policies: inclusion and accessibility. In creating the Beyond The Statement: Tech Framework for Color Of Change, Aerica Shimizu Banks illuminated a pathway to consistent and nimble innovation through the “Curb-Cut Effect” of inclusive practices and policies. This presentation will explore how she found, through developing this framework, that the more inclusive a policy, the more innovative possibilities become for content moderation.
Aerica Shimizu Banks is a tech policy expert and inclusion innovator. She is the founder of Shiso, a consultancy that applies an intersectional equity lens to business development, tech, and policy challenges. After experiencing the triumphs and trials of tech – building successful DEI programs at Google and then holding Pinterest accountable for its racism and sexism – she now creates systems and frameworks to elevate and restore equity in our institutions at her firm. Named to the 2021 Root 100, a 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, and a 2017 Washingtonian Magazine Tech Titan, Aerica's career is a testament to the values she lives in her personal and professional life. In her personal capacity, she served on President Biden's innovation policy committee, helped pass the Silenced No More Act in California, and currently advises federal tech policy legislation. Professional highlights include founding Pinterest's DC office and leading federal affairs; leading diversity and equity initiatives on Google's legal team and serving as the Black small business liaison for the DC area; co-founding BEACON: The DC Women Founders Initiative; and serving as a political appointee in the Obama Administration. She holds an MSc in Environmental Policy from Oxford University and a BA in Environmental Studies and Public Affairs from Seattle University.
Julie Owono is the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL) and a fellow of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. She is also the Executive Director of digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières, one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar. With a fluency in five languages, a childhood spent in various countries, and an educational background at the Lyçée Français Alexandre Dumas in Moscow, Julie has a unique perspective to understand the challenges and opportunities of a global Internet. This background has shaped her belief that global and multi stakeholder collaborations can be instrumental in the emergence of rights-based content policies and regulations. Julie is a member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) created by France and Canada, as well as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on AI for Humanity, and of the WEF Council on the Connected World. She was also a member of UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG), which drafted the first international text on Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Julie is a Member of the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Expert Committee on Digital Inclusion.
Charles is a Research Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, and a board member of the International Centre for Trade Transparency and Monitoring. Charles served as an elected member of the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, representing the Information Technology functional constituency, for two terms from 2012 to 2020. In 2021, he founded Tech for Good Asia, an initiative to advocate positive use of technology for businesses and civil communities. As an entrepreneur, Charles co-founded HKNet in 1994, one of the earliest Internet service providers in Hong Kong, which was acquired by NTT Communications in 2000. He was the founding chair of the Internet Society Hong Kong, honorary president and former president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, former chair of the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association, and former chair of the Asian, Australiasian and Pacific Islands Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) of ICANN. Charles holds a BS in Computer and Electrical Engineering and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.
Chris Hoofnagle
Zahra Takhshid
