Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, February 6th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Anticipating Racial Harms to Democracy from AI, a conversation with Spencer Overton, Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington Law School. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

The talk will focus on Professor Overton’s current work-in-progress, Anticipating Racial Harms to Democracy from Artificial Intelligence.

By the year 2045, demographers predict there will be no majority ethnic group in the United States, and generative artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to facilitate our transition to a democracy that protects the political liberties of individuals of all racial backgrounds. AI could empower a diverse array of candidates and community organizations by lowering the costs of and increasing access to data analysis, microtargeting, content creation, voter mobilization, monitoring policy debates, research and policy analysis, and civic mobilization.

Demography, however, is not destiny. While AI has many beneficial applications for a racially-inclusive democracy, if left unchecked it will also facilitate many harms. Political demagogues and foreign governments will utilize AI to target disinformation campaigns, stoke racial resentment and polarization, and deploy cyberattacks on election software and equipment in localities that serve large populations of voters of color. Entrenched politicians could use AI to more effectively identify voting restrictions and gerrymandering schemes that contain the influence of emerging communities of color. Even absent intentional discrimination, foundation models used to create content, moderate content, detect deepfakes, maintain voter rolls, verify mail-in ballot signatures, provide language assistance, and perform other tasks could replicate disadvantage and embed racial, language, and cultural hierarchy in elections and policymaking well into the future. The homogeneity of those who develop the tools and govern tech companies and the failure to prioritize the unique ways in which many communities of color experience AI technologies only compound the anti-democratic nature of the harms. 

Even though anticipating harm is an emerging AI principle and race is the most significant demographic factor in shaping U.S. voting patterns, others have not comprehensively anticipated the racial harms to democracy from AI. Recognizing the growing significance of AI in elections, demographic change, cultural anxiety, antidemocratic sentiment, and a U.S. Supreme Court increasingly hostile to traditional voting rights protections, anticipating the racial harms of AI is the essential first step in developing legal structures that will secure representative democracy for future generations in the United States.

About the Speaker

Spencer Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor at GW Law and writes and teaches on democracy and race.  He is the author of State Power to Regulate Social Media Companies to Prevent Voter Suppression and has testified before Congress (June 2020, October 2020, March 2023, and November 2023) on policies to stop online disinformation.  He also directs GW’s Multiracial Democracy Project, which is currently researching harms to multiracial democracy posed by: 1) artificial intelligence; and 2) continued challenges to the Voting Rights Act. 

From 2014-2023, Professor Overton served as the President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies—America’s Black think tank—where he restored the organization’s fiscal health, established several program areas (including tech policy), and worked closely with civil rights groups, the Congressional Black Caucus, and various other policymakers to increase diversity among top political appointees and to devise and advance racially-equitable policies. Under his leadership the Joint Center became an early partner of the Partnership on AI, reframed national discussions on the future of work to include a racial analysis, proposed a civil rights carve out for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that was included in federal legislation introduced by Senator Mark Warner and Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, and proposed several solutions to expand access to broadband in the Black Rural South that were enacted into law in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2022. 

Professor Overton also held several senior leadership roles during the Obama campaign, transition, and Administration. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he led over 140 experts as chair of the campaign’s Government Reform Policy committee. On the transition, he chaired the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Agency Review Team and helped write the Administration’s ethics guidelines while serving in the office of the General Counsel. During the Administration, he was appointed as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and partnered with other senior officials in leading the Administration’s democracy policy efforts related to the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Administration’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited corporate spending in federal elections.

Professor Overton’s work on the Jimmy Carter-James Baker Commission laid the groundwork for modern arguments against unnecessary voting restrictions. As a member of the DNC Presidential Nomination Scheduling Commission, he led an effort that resulted in Iowa restoring voting rights to over 80,000 returning citizens. He was also part of a group of commissioners that worked to successfully move more diverse states like South Carolina and Nevada to the beginning of the modern Democratic presidential primary process, which would later have significant implications in selecting the Democratic nominee in 2008 (Barack Obama) and 2020 (Joseph Biden).   

Professor Overton currently serves on the board of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Education Fund, and has also served on the national boards of the American Constitution Society, the Center for Responsive Politics (Open Secrets), Common Cause, and Demos. 

Prior to joining the academy, Overton practiced law at the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith, and graduated with honors from both Hampton University and Harvard Law School. 

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 30th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for The Embodied Web: How will physical and digital data meet in the next iteration of the internet? with technology and human rights expert, Brittan Heller. The seminar will focus on how spatial computing–or the embodied web–will bring up novel issues for privacy, human rights, and security. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

About the Speaker

Brittan Heller works at the intersection of technology, human rights and the law. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, examining XR's connection to society, human rights, privacy, and security. Heller is on the steering committee for the World Economic Forum's Metaverse Governance initiative and studied content moderation in XR as an inaugural AI and Tech Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights. She is a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, a Senior Non-Residential Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and an affiliate at the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. Heller has been awarded a 2024 Bellagio Residency to write about the intersection of spatial computing and AI.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 23rd from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output, a conversation with Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School professor. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

Volokh will speak about his article on the topic of large libel models and liability, exploring the question, if ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Bing Copilot say false and damaging things about you, can you successfully sue their creators for libel?

About the Speaker

Eugene Volokh teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow (Senior Fellow starting May 2024) at the Hoover Institution. Before his role at UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 16th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose its Harmful Secrets, a conversation with Wall Street Journal reporter, and author Jeff Horwitz. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

Horwitz will discuss his research and reporting that led to his book Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose its Harmful Secrets. Broken Code expands on “The Facebook Files,” his blockbuster, award-winning series for The Wall Street Journal, and lays out not just the architecture of Facebook’s failures, but what the company knew—and disregarded.

About the Speaker

Jeff Horwitz is a technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal based in San Francisco, where he covers Meta and social-media platforms. He is the author of “Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets.”

His work on the Journal’s Facebook Files won a George Polk Award, a Gerald Loeb Award and the Chris Welles Memorial Prize. 

Previously he was a financial and enterprise reporter for the Associated Press in Washington, D.C. Jeff has also worked for American Banker, Legal Times, the San Bernardino Sun and the Washington City Paper.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 9th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, a conversation with Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

In her book Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, Anu Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches governing the digital economy—the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model—and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Each digital empire is advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.

About the Speaker

A leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and a sought-after commentator on the European Union, global economy, and digital regulation, Anu Bradford coined the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsize influence on global markets. She is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her newest book, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2023, and was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by Financial Times.

Bradford is also an expert in international antitrust law. She spearheads the Comparative Competition Law Project, which has built a comprehensive global data set of antitrust laws and enforcement across time and jurisdictions. The project, a joint effort between the Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, covers more than a century of regulation in over 100 countries and has been the basis for Bradford’s recent empirical research on the antitrust regimes used to regulate markets. 

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2012, Bradford was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also practiced EU and antitrust law in Brussels and has served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. The World Economic Forum named her Young Global Leader ’10. 

At the Law School, Bradford is the director of the European Legal Studies Center, which trains students for leadership roles in European law, public affairs, and the global economy. She is also a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Bartels dismantles the pervasive myth of a "populist wave" in contemporary European public opinion. He shows that attitudes regarding immigration, European integration, trust in politicians, and satisfaction with democracy have remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. Electoral gains by right-wing populist parties have mostly reflected idiosyncratic failures of mainstream parties; both their magnitude and their implications have been exaggerated by the press. Europe's most sobering examples of democratic backsliding--in Hungary and Poland--occurred not because voters wanted authoritarianism but because conventional conservative parties, once elected, seized opportunities to entrench themselves in power.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larry Bartels's research and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and democracy. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd edition) and (with Christopher Achen) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. He has also published dozens of scholarly articles and brief pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and other popular media outlets. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Philosophical Society.

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

How do nations grapple with a history of past atrocities? Does recognition of historical crimes in public discourse lead citizens to embrace a past that may devalue their national identity, or does it foster backlash and illiberal nationalism? Perhaps no better example of a paradigm of confronting the past exists than the case of post-war Germany, a country marked by the legacy of the Nazi atrocities in World War II.

More than half a century later, we ask how public recognition of collective culpability in public discourse, education, and culture, has affected German national identity and attitudes towards the country's history. We conducted a nationwide representative survey of German-born adults and relied on an experimental treatment to distinguish between private preferences and their public expression. Our findings suggest that the low levels of national pride and muted emotional connection to German history that are expressed by the German public have been internalized and are not the result of social desirability concerns. Yet a stigma surrounds the public expression of a desire to move on from the historical narrative that emphasizes Germany's role as a perpetrator of atrocities. Our study highlights both the potential for success and the costs of public recognition of a nation's historical sins.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Vasiliki Fouka is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. Her research interests include historical political economy, political behavior, and cultural economics, with a main focus on immigrant assimilation, the determinants of prejudice against ethnic and racial minorities, and the long-run effects of history for inter-group relations.  

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Despite the policy failures that enabled and even encouraged the buildup of risk in the banking system and ultimately led to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, “reformed” rules remain poorly designed, the system remains much too fragile and dangerous, and bailouts persist. In resisting beneficial reforms, bank lobbies make false, misleading, and self-serving arguments. The weak rules and poor enforcement reflect the symbiosis of bankers with politicians, the media, lawyers, and economists. They encourage and enable a culture of recklessness, rule infringements, and even criminal behavior, with impunity. The power of bankers to distort rules and political discourse threatens our democracies. This talk will be based on the new and expanded edition of Anat Admati's The Bankers' New Clothes: What is Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2024), coauthored with Martin Hellwig, and other writings.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and faculty director of the Corporations and Society Initiative. Her interests lie in the interaction of business, law, and policy, with a focus on governance and accountability issues. Since 2010, Admati has been engaged in policy discussions related to financial regulations. In 2014, she was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and by Foreign Policy magazine as among 100 global thinkers. Admati has written on information dissemination in financial markets, financial contracting, corporate governance, and banking. She is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press 2013, expanded edition 2024).

Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a past board member of the American Finance Association, and a former member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee and the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, November 28th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Centering Youth Voices in Pursuit of Healthier Social Media Experiences, a conversation with Vicki Harrison, Director of Programs and Partnerships for the Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing in the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. The session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and is the final session of the Fall Seminar Series, a series spanning October through December, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Conference Room #119, 615 Crothers Way.

In the midst of a national youth mental health crisis, many parents, educators and policymakers are concerned about the role social media plays in contributing to these high rates of mental health needs. This has led to many new calls for legislation, lawsuits and policy reform. But to what extent are young people themselves contributing to these policy conversations? Are their ideas being considered and heard? In this talk, Harrison will explain why incorporating youth voice matters and how it can happen. By highlighting successful examples of youth co-design efforts from her work with the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing, she will describe some best practices for working with youth advisors and share several youth perspectives on social media policy, taken directly from the GoodforMEdia project that she co-developed with youth.

About the Speaker

As the Director of Programs and Partnerships for the Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing in the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Vicki develops and implements a portfolio of community-based projects promoting wellbeing, early intervention and mental health access for youth ages 12-25. This includes bringing - allcove - an innovative, integrated youth mental health model, to the U.S. She co-led development of the allcove model at all stages -from its initial feasibility assessment, to fundraising, development of the allcove brand and related digital strategy and experience design, pilot implementation and establishment of the allcove technical assistance team that is currently supporting the establishment of one dozen allcove centers across California. 
 

Vicki also co-leads a national Media and Mental Health Initiative, partnering with the media, mental health and technology sectors to enhance the positive impacts of media on mental health. Along with a committee of passionate youth advocates, Vicki developed and launched the #goodforMEdia program, a peer mentoring project where teens offer peer support and educational advocacy by sharing strategies for supporting each other’s mental health when engaging with social media. She regularly speaks to national and international audiences on a range of topics related to youth mental health and media and has provided expertise to the United States Office of the President, Department of Homeland Security and the California State Legislature on social media’s impacts on youth mental health. Vicki was part of a multidisciplinary team that developed and published “The Tool for Evaluating Media Portrayals of Suicide (TEMPOS): Development and Application of a Novel Rating Scale to Reduce Suicide Contagion” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and has been training national audiences on its relevance and utility. Vicki also serves as a founding member of the TikTok US Content Advisory Council and has collaborated with a range of technology/media companies and non-profits on their efforts to improve youth mental health.