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Social media sites have now surpassed cable, network, and local TV as primary sources of political news for one-in-five Americans. Yet the speed and volume of online information, challenges discerning the credibility of online sources, and concerns about viral online disinformation place a significant burden on users. What do we know about what new user-facing digital literacy initiatives are underway, what the research has to say about the impact and effectiveness of media literacy interventions, and what the implications are for both corporate and government policy.

On Wednesday, October 14th, from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. Pacific Time, please join Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Jennifer Kavanaugh, of RAND’s Countering Truth Decay initiativeKristin Lord, President and CEO of IREX, and Claire Wardle, co-founder and director of First Draft, for a discussion on the state of Media Literacy.

Kristin Lord
Jennifer Kavanaugh
Claire Wardle
Seminars
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In this live webinar, Torin Jones (Stanford) will speak with Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz) and Angelica Pesarini (NYU Florence) about the Black Lives Matter movement in Italy, focusing on ethnographic methods and ongoing questions related to the histories of Italian colonialism, immigration, and the Black Mediterranean.

ADMISSION: FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9FYoKW3Iu8RGq4l


Co-sponsored by The Center for Global Ethnography, the Department of Anthropology, and The Europe Center.

Zoom Webinar

Camilla Hawthorne, UC Santa Cruz
Torin Jones, Stanford
Angelica Pesarini, NYU Florence
Workshops
Authors
Rose Gottemoeller
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Where is nuclear arms control—negotiated restraints on the deadliest weapons of mass destruction—headed? This 50-year tool of US national security policy is currently under attack. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear arms agreement with the Russian Federation, will go out of force in February 2021 unless it is extended for an additional five years as the treaty permits. At this moment, nothing is on the horizon to replace it.

Read the rest at The Washington Quarterly

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Where is nuclear arms control—negotiated restraints on the deadliest weapons of mass destruction—headed? This 50-year tool of US national security policy is currently under attack.

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Soojong Kim

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL). He received his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around social media, misinformation, and computational social science. As a former computer scientist and engineer, he is also interested in applying and developing innovative research methods, including web-based experiments, computational modeling, network analysis, and natural language processing.

He is recently focusing on three research projects. (1) Real-time Misinformation Monitoring: Evaluating the impacts of real-world misinformation messages in real-time and reducing their adverse socio-psychological consequences. (2) Virtual Social Media: Discovering and examining factors that influence behavior and perception of social media users based on interactive multi-agent network experiments. (3) Map of Misinformation: Investigating the structure of disinformation messages and the landscape of the fake news ecosystem and designing effective misinformation suppression/prevention strategies.

Dr. Kim worked at Samsung Electronics as a computer scientist for several years after earning his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University, South Korea. He also holds his Master's degree in sociology. He is a recipient of the ICA Best Paper Award, Wharton Russell Ackoff Fellowship, Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant Award, Annenberg Doctoral Research Fellowship, and MisinfoCon Research Grant.

Find more information on Dr. Kim’s research and news at his personal site http://www.soojong.kim/

Postdoctoral Fellow
Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL)
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This event is being live-streamed on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PTnI4nwGRLCERCHdP-cogw

On August 9, 2020, Belarus held a presidential election, which Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus' president of 26 years — claimed to have won with 80 percent of the vote. Exit polling, however, demonstrated that the opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, actually garnered wide popular support. Since the election, Belarusians have taken to the streets to demand a new election and/or that Lukashenko step down. But the regime appears intent on remaining in power and has used force against peaceful protesters. Workers in key factories have since gone on strike, and widespread protests continue. 

Join us for a special zoom seminar on Wednesday, August 19 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. PDT with Michael A. McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and former US Ambassador to Russia; Anna Grzymala-Busse, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center; and Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow and Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program at FSI in a session on the events in Belarus that will be moderated by Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panel Discussions
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Daphne Keller
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Q&As
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Daphne Keller leads the newly launched Program on Platform Regulation a program designed to offer lawmakers, academics, and civil society groups ground-breaking analysis and research to support wise governance of Internet platforms.

Q: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rely on algorithms and artificial intelligence to provide services for their users. Could AI also help in protecting free speech and policing hate speech and disinformation?   

DK: Platforms increasingly rely on artificial intelligence and other algorithmic means to automate the process of assessing – and sometimes deleting – online speech. But tools like AI can’t really “understand” what we are saying, and automated tools for content moderation make mistakes all the time. We should worry about platforms’ reliance on automation, and worry even more about legal proposals that would make such automated filters mandatory. Constitutional and human rights law give us a legal framework to push back on such proposals, and to craft smarter rules about the use of AI. I wrote about these issues in this New York Times op ed and in some very wonky academic analysis in the Journal of European and International IP Law.

Q: Can you explain the potential impacts on citizens’ rights when the platforms have global reach but governments do not?

DK: On one hand, people worry about platforms displacing the legitimate power of democratic governments. On the other hand, platforms can actually expand state power in troubling ways. One way they do that is by enforcing a particular country’s speech rules everywhere else in the world. Historically that meant a net export of U.S. speech law and values, as American companies applied those rules to their global platforms. More recently, we’ve seen that trend reversed, with things like European and Indian courts requiring Facebook to take user posts down globally – even if the users’ speech would be legally protected in other countries. Governments can also use soft power, or economic leverage based on their control of access to lucrative markets, to convince platforms to “voluntarily” globally enforce that country’s preferred speech rules. That’s particularly troubling, since the state influence may be invisible to any given users whose rights are affected.   

There is such a pressing need for thoughtful work on the laws that govern Internet platforms right now, and this is the place to do it... We have access to the people who are making these decisions and who have the greatest expertise in the operational realities of the tech platforms.
Daphne Keller
Director of Program on Platform Regulation, Cyber Policy Center Lecturer, Stanford Law School

Q: Are there other ways that platforms can expand state power? 

DK: Yes, platforms can let states bypass democratic accountability and constitutional limits by using private platforms as proxies for their own agenda. States that want to engage in surveillance or censorship are constrained by the U.S. Constitution, and by human rights laws around the world. But platforms aren’t. If you’re a state and you want to do something that would violate the law if you did it yourself, it’s awfully tempting to coerce or persuade a platform to do it for you. This issue of platforms being proxies for other actors isn’t limited to governments – anyone with leverage over a platform, including business partners, can potentially play a hidden role like this.

I wrote about this complicated nexus of state and private power in Who Do You Sue? for the Hoover Institution.    

Q: What inspired you to create the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center right now?

DK: There is such a pressing need for thoughtful work on the laws that govern Internet platforms right now, and this is the place to do it. At the Cyber Policy Center, there’s an amazing group of experts, like Marietje Schaake, Eileen Donahoe, Alex Stamos and Nate Persily, who are working on overlapping issues. We can address different aspects of the same issues and build on each other’s work to do much more together than we could individually.

The program really benefits from being at Stanford and in Silicon Valley because we have access to the people who are making these decisions and who have the greatest expertise in the operational realities of the tech platforms. 

The Cyber Policy Center is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

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Q&A with Daphne Keller
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Keller explains some of the issues currently surrounding platform regulation

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Scott D. Sagan
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Just days before the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bulletin hosted a global webinar featuring Scott Sagan, Bulletin SASB member and Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; Allen Weiner, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law; led by Sara Kutchesfahani, director of N Square DC Hub.

Watch at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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The Bulletin hosted a global webinar featuring Scott Sagan, Bulletin SASB member and Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; Allen Weiner, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law; led by Sara Kutchesfahani, director of N Square DC Hub.

Authors
Scott D. Sagan
Herbert Lin
Lynn Eden
Rodney C. Ewing
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Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States used the most powerful weapons developed until that time to attack the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because the atomic bombings caused such extraordinary damage amid an already-disrupted wartime Japan, the number of people who died as a direct result of the attack can’t be pinpointed. Initial US military estimates placed the immediate death toll at 70,000 in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. Later independent estimates suggest that 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and 70,000 were killed in Nagasaki.

Read the rest at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

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The Science and Security Board calls on all countries to reject the fantasy that nuclear weapons can provide a permanent basis for global security and to refrain from pursuing new nuclear weapons capabilities that fuel nuclear arms races.

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Social Media and Democracy book symposium

Please join the Cyber Policy Center for a discussion of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform, a new book with chapters by scholars and faculty at the Cyber Policy Center. The book explores the emerging multi-disciplinary field of social media and democracy, by synthesizing what we know, identifying what we do not know and obstacles to future research, and charting a course for the future inquiry. Chapters by leading scholars cover major topics – from disinformation to hate speech to political advertising – and situate recent developments in the context of key policy questions. In addition, the book canvasses existing reform proposals in order to address widely perceived threats that social media poses to democracy. 

Please note that we will also have a YouTube livestream available for potential overflow or for anyone having issues connecting via Zoom: https://youtu.be/KXtMB-3DlHc

REGISTER

 

AGENDA subject to change, with Q&A integrated throughout

  • 9 a.m.: Introduction with Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University
  • 9:15 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
    • Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda with Andrew M. Guess, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
    • Online Hate Speech with Alexandra A. Siegel, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder
    • Bots and Computational Propaganda: Automation for Communication and Control with Samuel C. Woolley, Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin
    • Online Political Advertising in the United States with Travis N. Ridout, Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington State University and Co-Director of the Wesleyan Media Project
  • 10:30 a.m.: 10 min break
  • 10:40 a.m - 11:40 a.m.: 
    • Democratic Creative Destruction? The Effect of a Changing Media Landscape on Democracy with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford
    • Misinformation and Its Correction with Adam J. Berinksy, Mitsui Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab

    • Comparative Media Regulation in the United States and Europe with Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and Andrew Grotto, William J. Perry International Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center

  • 11:40 a.m.: 10 min break
  • 11:50 a.m - 12:30 p.m.: 
    • Facts and Where to Find Them: Empirical Research on Internet Platforms and Content Moderation with Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center
    • Democratic Transparency in the Platform Society, with Robert Gorwa, doctoral student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford
  • 12:30 p.m.Closing and final Q&A with Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker

 

Adam J. Berinsky

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

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Francis Fukuyama
Robert Gorwa
Andrew Guess

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C428

Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 723-9866
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Andrew Grotto

Andrew J. Grotto is a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Grotto’s research interests center on the national security and international economic dimensions of America’s global leadership in information technology innovation, and its growing reliance on this innovation for its economic and social life. He is particularly interested in the allocation of responsibility between the government and the private sector for defending against cyber threats, especially as it pertains to critical infrastructure; cyber-enabled information operations as both a threat to, and a tool of statecraft for, liberal democracies; opportunities and constraints facing offensive cyber operations as a tool of statecraft, especially those relating to norms of sovereignty in a digitally connected world; and governance of global trade in information technologies.

Before coming to Stanford, Grotto was the Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations. His portfolio spanned a range of cyber policy issues, including defense of the financial services, energy, communications, transportation, health care, electoral infrastructure, and other vital critical infrastructure sectors; cybersecurity risk management policies for federal networks; consumer cybersecurity; and cyber incident response policy and incident management. He also coordinated development and execution of technology policy topics with a nexus to cyber policy, such as encryption, surveillance, privacy, and the national security dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

At the White House, he played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan and driving its implementation. He was also the principal architect of President Trump’s cybersecurity executive order, “Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure.”

Grotto joined the White House after serving as Senior Advisor for Technology Policy to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, advising Pritzker on all aspects of technology policy, including Internet of Things, net neutrality, privacy, national security reviews of foreign investment in the U.S. technology sector, and international developments affecting the competitiveness of the U.S. technology sector.

Grotto worked on Capitol Hill prior to the Executive Branch, as a member of the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He served as then-Chairman Dianne Feinstein’s lead staff overseeing cyber-related activities of the intelligence community and all aspects of NSA’s mission. He led the negotiation and drafting of the information sharing title of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which later served as the foundation for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that President Obama signed in 2015. He also served as committee designee first for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and later for Senator Kent Conrad, advising the senators on oversight of the intelligence community, including of covert action programs, and was a contributing author of the “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Before his time on Capitol Hill, Grotto was a Senior National Security Analyst at the Center for American Progress, where his research and writing focused on U.S. policy towards nuclear weapons - how to prevent their spread, and their role in U.S. national security strategy.

Grotto received his JD from the University of California at Berkeley, his MPA from Harvard University, and his BA from the University of Kentucky.

Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation
Director, Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance
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Andrew Grotto
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Daphne Keller is the Director of Platform Regulation at the Stanford Program in Law, Science, & Technology. Her academic, policy, and popular press writing focuses on platform regulation and Internet users'; rights in the U.S., EU, and around the world. Her recent work has focused on platform transparency, data collection for artificial intelligence, interoperability models, and “must-carry” obligations. She has testified before legislatures, courts, and regulatory bodies around the world on topics ranging from the practical realities of content moderation to copyright and data protection. She was previously Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had responsibility for the company’s web search products. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Brown University, and Head Start.

SHORT PIECES

 

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

 

POLICY PUBLICATIONS

 

FILINGS

  • U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief on behalf of Francis Fukuyama, NetChoice v. Moody (2024)
  • U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief with ACLU, Gonzalez v. Google (2023)
  • Comment to European Commission on data access under EU Digital Services Act
  • U.S. Senate testimony on platform transparency

 

PUBLICATIONS LIST

Director of Platform Regulation, Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology (LST)
Social Science Research Scholar
Date Label
Daphne Keller
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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Date Label
Nathaniel Persily
Travis Ridout
Alexandra A. Siegel
Joshua A. Tucker
Samuel C. Woolley
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