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Join us for our winter seminar series starting Tuesday, January 11 from 12 PM - 1 PM PST.  The first in the session is Cloud Governance Challenges and features leaders from the Carnegie Endowment’s Cloud Governance Project and Marietje Schaake of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, 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.

Central to the ongoing digital transformation is the growth of cloud computing, which is enabling remarkable gains in efficiency, innovation, and connectivity around the world. However, the cloud also accentuates many preexisting digital policy challenges and brings to the fore new ones. It increases the consequences of disruption resulting from cyberattacks and natural disasters, and raises the stakes associated with ensuring equitable access to the digital environment. It also creates some new challenges associated with the concentration of the cloud market in the hands of a few hyperscale providers. Left to their own devices, cloud providers lack the incentives to comprehensively address these issues, and governments’ ability to fill the gap is being challenged by the pace of the developments in the cloud technology landscape. To promote more coherent and effective governance of the cloud, concerned players must recognize the challenges, interconnections, and policy tradeoffs across issue areas. They will need to apply a combination of regulation, self-regulation, and industry standards, while balancing competing private, national, and international interests. 

Speakers:

Kelly Born, Director, Cyber Initiative, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Ariel Eli Levite, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Vishnu Kannan, Special Assistant to the President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director, Cyber Policy Center
 

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Join us  Tuesday, December 7th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for “Media Choices, Niche Behavior, and Biases in Online Information” featuring Sandra González-Bailón, Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.  

The quality of our democracies relies on the quality of the information that citizens consume but we still know very little about how citizens engage with the news “in the wild”. In this talk, I will discuss two papers that examine that question in different settings. The first paper analyzes the media choices of a representative panel of the U.S. population (N ~ 55,000) as they consume TV, web, and YouTube content over a period of 44 months. Less than 10% of the panelists (N ~ 5,300) view and browse news on the three platforms. This small group of news hyper-consumers is formed predominantly by older male users with higher education. We find no evidence of substitution effects in the time these users spend consuming news on each of the three platforms, but consuming news across the media landscape is a choice that only a small and unrepresentative slice of the population makes. These results help us characterize the digital equivalent of the ‘opinion leaders’ first proposed to understand the effects of mass media. The hyper-consumers we identify in our analyses create the elite of opinion leaders that have a disproportionate influence in how news content is selected, circulated, and (ultimately) algorithmically amplified. That this small group is far from representing the population at large is one of the ways in which online information may perpetuate important biases in the salience of some topics over others. The second paper analyzes news sharing in social media during one of the largest protest mobilizations in U.S. history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. We extract the list of URLs shared during the mobilization period and we characterize those web sites in terms of their audience reach and the ideological composition of that audience. We also analyze the reliability of the sites in terms of the credibility and transparency of the information they publish. We show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. Our results suggest that online networks are contested spaces where the activism of progressive movements coexists with the narratives of mainstream media, which gain visibility under the same stream of information but whose reporting is not necessarily aligned with the activists’ goals.

About the speaker:

Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, computational tools, and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). More information on her research can be found at https://sandragonzalezbailon.net/
 
Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.

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Join us Tuesday, November 30th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for Understanding and Countering Problematic Information on Social Media Platforms featuring Tanu Mitra, Assistant Professor at University of Washington’s Information School. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

Online social media platforms have brought numerous positive changes, including access to vast amounts of news and information. Yet, those very opportunities have created new challenges—our information ecosystem is now rife with problematic content, ranging from misinformation, conspiracy theories, to hateful and incendiary propaganda. As a social computing researcher, Dr. Mitra’s work introduces computational methods and systems to understand and design defenses against such problematic online content. In this talk, she will focus on two aspects of problematic online information: 1) conspiracy theories and 2) extremist propaganda.

First, leveraging data spanning millions of conspiratorial posts on Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, Dr. Mitra will present scalable methods to unravel who participates in online conspiratorial discussions, what causes users to join conspiratorial communities and then potentially abandon them. Second, she will dive into a special type of problematic content: extremist hate groups. Merging theories from social movement research with big data analyses, Dr. Mitra will discuss the ecosystem of extremists’ communication and the roles played by them. Finally, she will close by previewing important new opportunities to address some of these problems, including conducting social audits to defend against algorithmically generated misinformation and designing socio-technical interventions to promote meaningful credibility assessment of information.

About the speaker:

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Join us next week on Tuesday, November 9th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT featuring Eric Goldman, Associate Dean for Research at Santa Clara University.

Many Internet services now routinely prepare transparency reports about information demands and content moderation operation. Some transparency reports are required by law; others are done voluntarily.

Transparency reporting can be justified on endogenous and exogenous grounds. Endogenously, transparency reports should encourage companies to devote more resources towards their subject matter; to increase the prioritization and professionalism of those functions; and to spur companies to “do better” on the principle that “what gets measured gets done.” Exogenously, transparency reports can inform consumers’ choices; provide research data to researchers, enforcement agencies, and policymakers; and sometimes function as warnings of unwanted external behavior (“canaries”). As a result, transparency reports will continue to draw regulators’ attention as an alternative to more direct/heavy-handed regulatory interventions.

This presentation examines a conundrum in the exogenous function of transparency reports (which likely spills over to the endogenous function). How do we know if the transparency reports are accurate? Outsiders cannot confirm the report’s statistics, so we are tempted to accept the numbers as true. But why should we? Transparency reports can be marketing or propaganda for their reporters; or they could simply underinvest in the production.