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image of Julie Owono and Phumzile Van Damme on blue background

Join us on Tuesday, May 31st from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for "A Former South African Politician’s Effort to Combat Misinformation in Elections" featuring Phumzile Van Damme, former Member of Parliament in South Africa, in conversation with Julie Owono of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL). 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.

About the Seminar: 

Misinformation during elections is a serious concern for democratic systems around the world. This is particularly true in various African countries, cases of electoral violence have been linked to disruptions in the informational realm. Yet, the underinvestment by technology companies in initiatives to limit the existence and impact of disinformation in Africa remains a reality.

Local initiatives have attempted to mitigate this inequality. This week’s webinar will focus on the work of Former South African MP Phumzile Van Damme, who launched a project to tackle the spread of misinformation on social media platforms before and during the local government elections in November 2021. She will share on the methodology used, and results observed. The webinar will also discuss the challenges faced in ensuring that South African users and citizens have access to reliable information.
 

About the Speakers:

Phumzile Van Damme is an independent consultant on disinformation and digital rights. She is a member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, the International Grand Committee on Disinformation, and an advisory council member of #ShePersisted. Van Damme’s work on misinformation was the subject of a documentary that premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2020, “Influence.” 
 
A former Member of Parliament in South Africa, Van Damme served on the Communications and Digital Technologies committee as Shadow Minister. She played a pivotal role in holding social media platforms accountable for misinformation on their platforms and spearheaded the summoning of Facebook and other tech giants to Parliament. 
 
In September 2021, she helped found and coordinate South Africa’s first electoral disinformation monitoring project, the ‘Local Government Anti-Disinformation Project’. She has spoken on various platforms on the subject of disinformation including at the UNDP and the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

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.

Phumzile Van Damme
Seminars
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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Rose Gottemoeller
David Holloway
Scott Sagan
Seminars

When the European Peace Project started – 72 years ago – WWII had just ended. It took the great vision and foresight of the “European founding fathers“ – Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, and Alcide De Gasperi and others – to bring about the most important change the European continent has ever seen. From a closer economic cooperation (coal and steel) to the founding of the European Communities (treaties of Rome 1957) to the creation of the European Union with its Single Market and the Schengen Area, Europe has experienced an era of peace, stability and prosperity like never before. Preserving these epochal achievements within European borders and extending to Europe’s immediate neighbors lies at the very heart of the Foreign and Security policy of the EU.

Now a brutal war has started, putting at risk lives and livelihoods of many, putting our economies under strain and  demanding quick and resolute political answers. The attacks in Ukraine mark a turning point (in the words of Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “Zeitenwende”) for the German, French and Common Foreign and Security Policy(CFSP). As highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the EU summit in Versailles in March 2022, “As a force of peace, we cannot rely on others to defend ourselves, be it on land, sea, air, space or cyberspace […]. Our European defense must take a new step.” This panel will discuss what a realigned CFSP could possibly look like, what role NATO could play in that context, and how Germany and France could contribute to this new order.

Co-sponsors:

Consulate General of France logoConsulate General of Germany logo

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Christophe Crombez

Online via Zoom

Gisela Müller-Brandeck-Bocquet, University of Würzburg
Pierre Haroche, Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM, Paris)
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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Dean Winslow
Seminars
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Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, addressing arms control policies in Europe and securing a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) was a priority for the Biden administration. The United States has been particularly interested in potential limits on nonstrategic nuclear warheads (NSNW), which have never been subject to an arms control agreement.
 

Because Russia possesses an advantage in the number of such weapons, the U.S. Senate has insisted that negotiators include them in a future agreement, making their inclusion necessary if such an accord is to win Senate approval and ultimately be ratified by Washington. In the wake of Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine conflict, such demands can only be expected to grow if and when U.S. and Russian negotiators return to the negotiating table.

Such an agreement will face major negotiating and implementation challenges—not only between Washington and Moscow, but also between Washington and NATO European allies. To stimulate this process, four NATO allies (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway) and one NATO partner (Sweden) funded a research team led by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and former NATO Deputy Secretary General and New START lead negotiator Rose Gottemoeller. The research focused on the negotiating, policy, legal, and technical issues that allies will likely have to address to reach such an accord.
 

Key Takeaways

 

  • NATO allies want to keep existing NSNW, and they want an agreement limiting Russian NSNW, and they expect to be substantively consulted before each round of negotiations. A decade ago, some US allies, such as Germany, appeared close to parting with the weapons because of public pressure despite considerable opposition within the alliance, particularly from newer allies with territory closer to Russian borders. While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to paper over these differences at the time, Russia’s behavior, including the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has helped reinforce allied views that under the present circumstances, maintaining NATO’s current nuclear-sharing arrangements is the right approach. At the same time, the Ukraine invasion may further reinforce some allies’ doubts about the value of such agreements with Russia. All allies will need to be reassured that arms control and deterrence do not clash, but rather complement each other. US leadership and willingness to engage in substantive consultations will be crucial in maintaining unity. The allies’ experience in negotiating the INF Treaty and the Biden administration’s current close work with NATO on Ukraine provide useful models.
     
  • Most of the Russian NSNW arsenal today is designed to support specific missions (as a backup to its emerging long-range conventional capability) and, from the perspective of the Russian military (particularly the Navy), will be tough to bargain away.
     
  • Addressing NSNW will require overcoming operational and technical verification challenges that are made more difficult by issues of information security, definitions, and stockpile disparities. Nuclear-warhead design, composition, and capabilities are among the most closely held secrets of the nuclear-weapon states, and warhead movements pose the most sensitive nuclear-security concerns. Because parts of a nuclear warhead are replaced on a regular basis and warhead configurations can differ greatly, it could prove challenging to establish a universal definition of a warhead, and their size and mobility present major obstacles to accounting for and tracking individual warheads. US and Russian NSNW stockpiles also differ significantly in types and numbers.
     
  • The experience in implementing the INF Treaty provides a useful starting point for considering how the new treaty might be implemented. Other agreements and inspection regimes to which many NATO allies are party also provide useful practical experience in preparing to host Russian inspectors. In advance of negotiations, allies should carry out a legal assessment to determine how domestic laws might need to be amended to carry out on-site inspections and other measures on their territory and a technical-capability assessment to determine how they might need to improve their staffing of national verification entities to implement an agreement.
     
  • Allies also need to enhance the analytical and legal capabilities of their foreign and defense ministries when it comes to NSNW and arms control. In most countries, such expertis has withered in the decades since the end of the Cold War; newer allies were never involved in INF Treaty negotiations or implementation, even indirectly.
     
  • US and allied research on verification measures for NSNW has largely focused on scientific and technical tools to conduct on-site inspections. The research team has developed an original and unique methodology for a data exchange employing historic stockpile data and taking advantage of past US-Russian cooperation and cryptography. This data exchange would serve as the critical backbone for other verification measures, no matter the type of warhead or the type of agreement (freeze, limitation, or reduction).
     
  • Finally, sustained political engagement at the highest level will be essential to the success of any arms control initiative involving allies. If there is a lesson from the past three decades of arms control in the Euro-Atlantic region, it is that a penny-wise and pound-foolish approach has decimated the personnel and the intellectual investment in arms control. When arms control has been pursued in recent years, it often has been done in isolation from security policy, national strategy, and military planning, rendering it at best a curio within foreign ministries. Until this topic is taken seriously as an instrument of hard power, to reinforce deterrence as one of the most important ways nations seek to avoid or limit war, it will not find purchase on the rocky ground of great-power competition.
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A team of experts led by Rose Gottemoeller has produced a new report for the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies on non-strategic nuclear warhead policies in Europe, particularly in light of Russia's changing status in the global nuclear community.

Authors
Rose Gottemoeller
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image of jeff hancock on blue background with ryan moore and ross dahlke

Join us on Tuesday, May 17th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 US Election” featuring Jeff Hancock, Ross Dahlke & Ryan Moore of the Social Media 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.

About The Seminar: 

Prior research has documented exposure to fake news and online misinformation using large-scale data on individuals’ media use, which has provided important information about the scope and nature of people’s exposure to misinformation online. However, most of this work has made use of data collected during the 2016 US election, and far fewer studies have examined how exposure to misinformation online has changed since 2016. In this paper, we examine exposure to untrustworthy websites in the lead up to the 2020 US election using a dataset of over 7.5 million passively tracked website visits from a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 1,151). We find that a significantly smaller percentage of Americans were exposed to untrustworthy websites in 2020 compared to in 2016 (as calculated by Guess et al. [2020]). While exposure was concentrated among similar groups of people as it was in 2016, levels of exposure appear to be lower across the board. There were also differences in the role online platforms played in directing people to untrustworthy websites in 2020 compared to 2016. Our findings have implications for future research and practice around online misinformation.

About The Speakers:

Jeff Hancock is the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Professor Hancock and his group work on understanding psychological and interpersonal processes in social media. The team specializes in using computational linguistics and experiments to understand how the words we use can reveal psychological and social dynamics, such as deception and trust, emotional dynamics, intimacy and relationships, and social support. Recently Professor Hancock has begun work on understanding the mental models people have about algorithms in social media, as well as working on the ethical issues associated with computational social science.

Ross Dahlke, from Westfield, Wisconsin, is pursuing a PhD in theory and research in the Stanford Social Media Lab at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science. Ross’s research focuses on applying AI and computational techniques to understand how people interact with complex systems. Before graduate school, he was a data scientist at a marketing technology firm where he developed machine learning platforms that helped Fortune 500 companies optimize their digital marketing spend in order to drive sales. He has also consulted on dozens of state-wide and local political campaigns. In high school, Ross started a cheese distribution business which has sold more than $3 million in cheese.

Ryan Moore studies how features of new media platforms and technologies affect the consumption, processing, and sharing of information, especially information about politics and news. In addition, he is interested in the role that age plays in internet and technology use, particularly as it relates to encountering deceptive or misleading content.

Seminars
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two logos displayed on blue abstract background, Korea Foundation and Stanford's GTG program

Geopolitics of Technology in East Asia

 

WHEN: May 17 & May 18 
WHERE: Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center (IN PERSON) or Live Webcast


AGENDA: 

Day 1 of the workshop will focus on the strategic dimensions of industrial policy relating to digital goods and services. Key topics include national security reviews of inbound and outbound investments, export controls, and supply chain risks, with a view towards identifying areas that are ripe for multilateral alignment as well as points of friction and options for managing those points of friction. Elaborating the respective roles and responsibilities of government and private sector actors will be an important theme.

Day 2 of the workshop will focus on regulatory policy and workforce challenges and opportunities, especially AI and its ecosystem of supporting technologies. 
 

FULL AGENDA

Andrew Grotto

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center or Live Webcast

Seminars
Authors
Rose Gottemoeller
News Type
News
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Executive Summary

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted in arms control talks with Russia that a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should cover all nuclear weapons and that such an agreement should focus on the nuclear warheads themselves. This would represent a significant change from previous agreements, which focused on delivery vehicles, such as missiles. The United States has been particularly interested in potential limits on nonstrategic nuclear warheads (NSNW). Such weapons have never been subject to an arms control agreement. Because Russia possesses an advantage in the number of such weapons, the US Senate has insisted that negotiators include them in a future agreement, making their inclusion necessary if such an accord is to win Senate approval and ultimately be ratified by Washington. In the wake of Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine conflict, such demands can only be expected to grow if and when US and Russian negotiators return to the negotiating table.

Read the rest at James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies

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Title page for Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe
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Subtitle

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted in arms control talks with Russia that a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should cover all nuclear weapons and that such an agreement should focus on the nuclear warheads themselves.

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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Frances Butcher
Sigrid Lupieri
Seminars
-

For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Karen Miller
Seminars
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