Moscow is more capable of disrupting global world order than it is given credit for, Kathryn Stoner argues.
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.
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.
Benjamin Rubin joined the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies as a member of the development team in 2021. Previously, he worked as a financial planner for Foster Klima & Company and as a professor of Roman Archaeology at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Benjamin received his BA in English and Classics from Macalester College and a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in Classical Art and Archaeology.
*For fall quarter 2021, 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.
(Open to all)
About the Event: The Afghan government’s collapse in August demonstrated that two decades of donor-driven state-building efforts failed to build a foundation for a stable, democratic, and prosperous Afghanistan. Why did the United States and its allies fail, and what should donors learn for similar state-building efforts in the future, both large and small?
Spanning the U.S. government’s problematic strategies, inappropriate timelines, and poor understanding of the Afghan context, lessons learned reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) have warned for years that the Afghan government was exceptionally fragile and that many of the gains alleged by the U.S. officials were hollow and unsustainable. This CISAC seminar will detail how and why the U.S. government should reform its own institutions to more effectively stabilize conflict-affected environments around the world.
Download SIGAR’s 20th anniversary report, What We Need to Learn (2021)
Download SIGAR’s report, Stabilization: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan (2018)
About the Speaker: David H. Young is a supervisory research analyst at the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and a conflict and governance advisor with experience in six conflict/post-conflict environments: Afghanistan, the Sahel, Israel/Palestine, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Northern Ireland. At SIGAR, he was the lead author of three comprehensive lessons learned reports: 1) A study of U.S. efforts to stabilize contested Afghan communities, 2) A review of U.S. efforts to build credible and transparent Afghan electoral institutions, and 3) the agency’s 20th anniversary report, What We Need to Learn. He was a civilian advisor to ISAF in Nuristan and Laghman provinces during the Afghanistan surge and subsequently served as a governance advisor to the World Bank, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Afghanistan's Independent Directorate of Local Governance. His writing and commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, and the Daily Beast, among others.
Virtual Only. This event will not be held in person.
Join us on November 16th for “Analyzing Social Media From A User-eye View With PIEGraph” from 12 - 1 PM PT featuring Deen Freelon, associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina. This session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
Quantitative social media research has traditionally been conducted from what might be called a platform-centric view, wherein researchers sample, collect, and analyzed data based on one or more topic- or user-specific keywords. Such studies have yielded many valuable insights, but they convey little about individual users’ tailored social media environments—what Professor Freelon calls the user-eye view. Studies that investigate social media from a user-eye view tend to be rare because of the expense involved and a limited number of suitable tools. This talk introduces PIEGraph, a novel system for user-eye view research that offers key advantages over existing systems. PIEGraph is lightweight, scalable, open-source, OS-independent, and collects data viewable from mobile and desktop interfaces directly from APIs. The system incorporates an extensible tagging taxonomy that allows for straightforward classification of a wide range of political, social, and cultural phenomena. The presentation will focus on how Professor Freelon’s research team is using PIEGraph to examine users’ potential levels of exposure to high- and low-quality information sources across the ideological spectrum.
Speakers:
Deen Freelon is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science. Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data.
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.
For winter 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.
About the Event: Rather than assuming convergence in countries' military capabilities, this seminar examines why and how countries decide to develop different weapon capabilities within similar domains of warfare. To answer these questions, this seminar will explore the role of ideas and institutional bargaining in shaping decisions about military technology. This talk will subsequently apply the theory to the development of missile defense from the 1980s until today.
About the Speaker: Sanne Verschuren is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. Her research interests include the development of military technology, shifts in military strategy and tactics, and the role of ideas and norms therein. Her book project examines why and how countries decide to procure different weapon capabilities within similar military domains, particularly the development of missile defense (1980s-today), air power (1920s-1930s), and aircraft carriers (1950s-1960s). At CISAC, Sanne conducts research on the intersection between nuclear and conventional weapons. Sanne received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University in August 2021.
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.
About the Event: Cyber operations have been traditionally considered covert actions, with incentives for both attacker and victim to remain silent and conceal the attack. Attribution is often a technically complex process that requires extensive work on the part of intelligence agencies. Although their work usually takes place ‘behind the scenes’, recent cases show intelligence agencies are playing an increasingly visible role in the public attribution processes.
With cyberattacks and intrusions becoming an integral component of both warfare and diplomacy, attribution – and its mechanisms and consequences – also play a growing role. Governments are increasingly required to balance expectations, credibility and transparency of high-stake attribution processes with the need to minimize exposure of their intelligence agencies and technological capabilities.
Combining original data on intelligence agencies’ involvement in public attribution cases and an analysis of the SolarWinds hack and the DNC intrusion as an illustrative case-studies, this research offers a broader understanding of the emerging changes in the role of intelligence agencies in the cyber domain, including its more public components. The implications of this research will serve scholars working on the intersection between cyber operations, intelligence and decision-making, and will also serve practitioners and decision-makers facing the need to decide how to respond after an offensive cyber operation took place.
About the Speaker: Dr. Gil Baram is a cybersecurity post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University’s School of Political Science, Government and International Relations, and was the recipient of the Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship. Her postdoctoral research at CISAC focuses on national decision-making during cyber conflict.
Previously, Dr. Baram has held fellow positions with the Centre of Excellence for National Security at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and served as the Head of cyber and space research team at the Israeli think tank Yuval Ne'eman workshop for Science, Technology and Security.
This event is virtual only. This event will not be held in person.
For fall quarter 2021, 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.
(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)
About the Event: The technology controlling United States nuclear weapons predates the Internet. Updating the technology for the digital era is necessary, but it comes with the risk that anything digital can be hacked. Moreover, using new systems for both nuclear and non-nuclear operations will lead to levels of nuclear risk hardly imagined before. This book is the first to confront these risks comprehensively.
With Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, Herbert Lin provides a clear-eyed breakdown of the cyber risks to the U.S. nuclear enterprise. Featuring a series of scenarios that clarify the intersection of cyber and nuclear risk, this book guides readers through a little-understood element of the risk profile that government decision-makers should be anticipating. What might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in the age of Twitter, with unvetted information swirling around? What if an adversary announced that malware had compromised nuclear systems, clouding the confidence of nuclear decision-makers?
Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, the first book to consider cyber risks across the entire nuclear enterprise, concludes with crucial advice on how government can manage the tensions between new nuclear capabilities and increasing cyber risk. This is an invaluable handbook for those ready to confront the unique challenges of cyber nuclear risk.
About the Speaker: Since 2014, Herb Lin has been senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. He also served as a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.
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.
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C236
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. His research interests relate broadly to the impact of emerging technologies on national security, especially in the digital domain (cyber, artificial intelligence, information warfare and operations), and has written extensively on the role of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy. In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology. From 2016 to 2025, he was a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 2016, he served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity and in 2021 on the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder. Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.
Avocationally, he is a longtime folk and swing dancer and a lousy magician. Apart from his work on cyberspace and cybersecurity, he is published in cognitive science, science education, biophysics, and arms control and defense policy. He also consults on K-12 math and science education.
*For fall quarter 2021, 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.
(Open to all)
About the Event: Natural gas prices in Europe have spiked in recent weeks. In the meantime, Russia is pressing for early certification of the newly-completed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which would increase capacity for moving gas from Russia to Europe. How serious is the gas situation in Europe, and how might Nord Stream 2 affect it? What motivates Moscow's push to get the new pipeline in operation? What policy should the U.S. government pursue on these questions? Ambassador Daniel Fried of the Atlantic Council and Edward Chow of Center for Strategic and International Studies will address these issues on November 17.
About the Speakers: In the course of his forty-year Foreign Service career, Ambassador Fried played a key role in designing and implementing American policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. As special assistant and NSC senior director for Presidents Clinton and Bush, ambassador to Poland, and assistant secretary of state for Europe (2005-09), Ambassador Fried crafted the policy of NATO enlargement to Central European nations and, in parallel, NATO-Russia relations, thus advancing the goal of Europe whole, free, and at peace. During those years, the West’s community of democracy and security grew in Europe. Ambassador Fried helped lead the West’s response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine starting in 2014: as State Department coordinator for sanctions policy, he crafted US sanctions against Russia, the largest US sanctions program to date, and negotiated the imposition of similar sanctions by Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia.
Edward C. Chow is an international energy expert with 45 years of industry experience working in Asia, Middle East, Africa, South America, Europe, Russia, Black Sea and Caspian regions. He negotiated successfully multibillion-dollar oil and gas agreements and specializes in investments in emerging economies. He developed government policy and business strategy while advising governments, international financial institutions, major oil companies, and leading multinational corporations. He worked for more than 20 years at Chevron Corporation in headquarter and overseas assignments. He taught at Georgetown and George Washington universities and served as visiting professor at Ohio University and Fudan University in Shanghai. He is a senior associate in the Center for Strategic and International Studies and affiliate faculty at George Mason University.
Virtual Only. This event will not be held in person.