Join Cyber Policy Center, June 17rd at 10am Pacific Time for Patterns and Potential Solutions to Disinformation Sharing, Under COVID-19 and Beyond, with Josh Tucker, David Lazer and Evelyn Douek.

The session will explore which types of readers are most susceptible to fake news, whether crowdsourced fact-checking by ordinary citizens works and whether it can reduce the prevalence of false news in the information ecosystem. Speakers will also look at patterns of (mis)information sharing regarding COVID-19: Who is sharing what type of information? How has this varied over time? How much misinformation is circulating, and among whom? Finally, we'll explore how social media platforms are responding to COVID disinformation, how that differs from responses to political disinformation, and what we think they could be doing better.

Evelyn Douek is a doctoral candidate and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society. Her research focuses on online speech governance, and the various private, national and global proposals for regulating content moderation.

David Lazer is a professor of political science and computer and information science and the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Before joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2009, he was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Program on Networked Governance. 

Joshua Tucker is Professor of Politics, Director Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, Co-Director NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab, Affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Affiliated Professor of Data Science.

The event is open to the public, but registration is required.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

Livestream: Please click here to join the livestream webinar via Zoom or log-in with webinar ID 913 4480 9317.

About the Event: How do states build lasting international order? Existing explanations of order formation argue that leading states are incentivized to create binding institutions with robust rules and strong enforcement mechanisms. The stability resulting from such institutionalized orders, scholars argue, allows leading states to geopolitically punch above their weight after they have declined in power. I argue, however, that such explanations overlook the trade-off between stability and flexibility, that leading states are faced with. Flexibility calls for short-term agreements that can be renegotiated when the strategic situation changes. And it allows the leading state to take advantage of relative power increases.Whereas states face significant incentives to err on the side of stability if they predict irreversible decline in power, states face incentives to err on the side of flexibility if they predict relative rise in power.  

About the Speaker: Mariya Grinberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 2019. Her primary research examines why states trade with their enemies, investigating the product level and temporal variation in wartime commercial policies of states vis-a-vis enemy belligerents. Her broader research interests include international relations theory focusing on order formation and questions of state sovereignty. Prior to coming to CISAC, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center’s International Security Program. She holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago's Committee on International Relations and a B.A. from the University of Southern California.

Join Cyber Policy Center, June 3rd at 10am PST for The Accelerated Shift to Online Retail Under Covid-19, and Risks Associated with Underlying Dynamic Pricing Technologies with Christo Wilson at Northeastern University and Ramsi Woodcock at University of Kentucky.

The hallmarks of the Covid-19 (a shortage of masks, hand sanitizer, food, along with an acceleration of the shift to online retail) are affording retailers the opportunity to use the dynamic pricing technologies already ubiquitous in online retail in order to ration access to goods that are in temporarily short supply. In a time of crisis, dynamic pricing may run afoul of state laws prohibiting price gouging. But the practice also raises important questions about both the equity of rationing with price and the safety of doing so. Dynamic pricing online may be pricing less wealthy Americans out of online goods and services, forcing them into riskier in-person transactions at brick and mortar store locations. Fortunately, the same technologies that make dynamic pricing possible also make more equitable alternatives to rationing with price cheap and effective for online retailers. 

On May 20th please join us for Perspectives on Science Communication, Misinformation, and the COVID-19 Infodemic, featuring University of Washington scholars Kate Starbird, Jevin West and Ryan Calo, in conversation with Cyber Policy Center Director Kelly Born, as they discuss a new project exploring how scientific findings and science credentials are mobilized in the spread of misinformation.

Kate Starbird and Jevin West will present emerging research into how scientific findings and science credentials are mobilized within the spread of false and misleading information about COVID-19. Ryan Calo will explore proposals to address COVID-19 through information technology—the subject of a recent Senate Commerce hearing at which he testified—with particular attention to the ways contact tracing apps could prove a vector for misinformation and disinformation. 

May 20, 10am-11am (PST)
Join via Zoom 

Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) and Director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) Laboratory. She is also adjunct faculty in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Information School and a data science fellow at the eScience Institute. 

Kate's research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics — the study of how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. Her research examines how people use social media to seek, share, and make sense of information after natural disasters (such as earthquakes and hurricanes) and man-made disasters (such as acts of terrorism and mass shooting events). More recently, her work has shifted to focus on the spread of disinformation in this context. 

Ryan Calo is the Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Law. In addition to co-founding the UW Center for an Informed Public, he is a faculty co-director (with Batya Friedman and Tadayoshi Kohno) of the UW Tech Policy Lab---a unique, interdisciplinary research unit that spans the School of Law, Information School, and Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering where Calo also holds courtesy appointments. Calo is widely published in the area of law and emerging technology. 

Jevin West is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He is the co-founder of the DataLab and the new Center for an Informed Public at UW. He holds an Adjunct Faculty position in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute. His research and teaching focus on misinformation in and about science. He develops methods for mining the scientific literature in order to study the origins of disciplines, the social and economic biases that drive these disciplines, and the impact the current publication system has on the health of science. 

Kelly Born is the Executive Director of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. The center’s research and teaching focuses on the governance of digital technology at the intersection of security, geopolitics and democracy. Born collaborates with the center’s program leaders to pioneer new lines of research, policy-oriented curriculum, and outreach to key decision-makers globally. Prior to joining Stanford, Born helped to launch and lead The Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic undertakings working to reduce polarization and improve U.S. democracy. There, she designed and implemented strategies focused on money in politics, electoral reform, civic engagement and digital disinformation. Kelly earned a master’s degree in international policy from Stanford University.