PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us at the weekly Cyber Policy Center (CPC) seminar on Tue, October 12th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST featuring Soojong Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet. This session will be moderated by Co-Director of the CPC, Nate Persily. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

There has been growing concern about online misinformation and falsehood. It has been suspected that the proliferation of misleading narratives is especially severe on Facebook, the world’s largest social media site, but there has been a lack of large-scale systematic investigations on these issues. This talk will introduce a series of ongoing research projects investigating online groups promoting misleading narratives on Facebook, including anti-vaccine groups, climate change denialists, countermovements against racial justice movements, and conspiracy theorists. The presentation will discuss the prevalence, characteristics, ecosystem of misleading narratives on Facebook, and implications for potential interventions.

Speaker Profile:

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around digital media, social networks, and information propagation. As a former computer scientist, he is also interested in developing and applying computational methods, including online experiments, large-scale data analysis, and computational modeling.

 

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us on October 5th at the Cyber Policy Center seminar from 12 PM - 1 PM PST featuring Becca Lewis, PhD Candidate in Communication at Stanford University. The session will be moderated by Kelly Born, Director of the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 

Conventional wisdom suggests that conspiracy theories and far-right propaganda thrive mainly at the end of algorithmic rabbit holes, in the deep, dark corners of the internet. This presentation will show that the opposite is true by explaining how in fact, harmful ideas gain traction through the charisma and popularity of internet celebrities in mainstream social media contexts. Through her extensive research on far-right YouTubers, Becca Lewis argues that instead of merely focusing our responses on the threat of algorithmic rabbit holes, we must also understand the power of amplification through thriving alternative media systems on- and offline.

Speaker Profile:

Becca Lewis is a Stanford Graduate Fellow and PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University, as well as a research affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute and the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Her research has been published in the journals Society Media + Society, Television and New Media, and American Behavioral Scientist, and her public writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review. She holds an MSc in Social Science from the Oxford Internet Institute.

 

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us via Zoom on Tue, September 28th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for a conversation with PDI fellows, Julie Owono and Dr Niousha Roshani, moderated by Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center, Nathaniel Persily, as they discuss the challenges to content policy and the solutions that a multistakeholder approach has to offer. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

 

The multistakeholder governance model is increasingly presented as a solution for addressing content governance issues online. While this inclusive and collaborative approach mirrors the foundational principle of an “open and free internet”, challenges with online content around scale and rapidity notably, call for further experimentation. 

The Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL), a new project of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center (CPC), aims to be one of these experiments - by creating a safe space for a diverse array of stakeholders from government, the private sector, civil society, and academia to share knowledge and collaborate on solutions.

Moderator: Nathaniel Persily, Co-Director, Cyber Policy Center

Speakers: Julie Owono, PDI Fellow and Niousha Roshani, PDI Fellow

 

 

 

The future of technology policy in Europe will be affected by growing nationalism and protectionism, cyber and national security threats, and great power rivalries. The Program on Democracy and the Internet invites you to a technology policy discussion led by International Policy Director, Marietje Schaake. Join us on September 16th from 9 AM - 12 PM PST (6 PM - 9 PM CET), as we dive into conversations on EU legislative packages, digital trade rules, and cybersecurity & geopolitics. We hope to develop a more precise understanding of how the EU and its allies can collaborate to create compatible technology standards, build more resilient supply chains, and address novel opportunities and risks presented by emerging technologies.This event is organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet (part of the Cyber Policy Center and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society) and co-sponsored by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Moderators: 

• Marietje Schaake, Cyber Policy Center and Stanford HAI
• Tyson Barker, German Council on Foreign Relations
• Jacquelyn Schneider, Hoover Institution

 

Speakers:

• Juha Heikkila, European Commission
• Rumman Chowdhury, Parity
• Joshua Meltzer, Brookings Institution
• Dmitri Alperovitch, Silverado Policy Accelerator
• Carisa Nietsche, Center for a New American Security
• Dame Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
• Dmitry Grozoubinski, ExplainTrade
• Carl Frey, Oxford University
• Nicolas Petit, European University Institute
• John Bansemer, Center for Security and Emerging Technology

 

About the Seminar: Africa arguably poses some of the most challenging conditions for democratic emergence and survival.  According to our existing theories, this is due to a number of economic, social, geographic factors, and institutional legacies of predatory neo-colonial states. Yet three decades of democratic endurance in significant, key cases suggest that the continent has much to teach us about how democracies maintain despite extremely challenging conditions. And the wave of global democratic backsliding has particular contours across the continent that illuminate how democratic institutions are utilized for autocratization, and with what constraints. This research project explores two most-different cases – South Africa and Benin – with highly diverse challenges and yet strikingly similar pathways to establish and maintain democracy against all odds, and the contemporary challenges that are pushing both to autocratic concessions.

 

 

About the Speaker: Rachel Beatty Riedl (PhD Princeton University) is the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, Director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her research interests include institutional development in new democracies, local governance and decentralization policy, authoritarian regime legacies, and religion and politics, with a regional focus in Africa. Previously, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research, and Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Riedl is co-host of the podcast Ufahamu Africa, featuring weekly episodes of news highlights and interviews about life and politics on the African continent.