Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet on Tuesday, January 31st, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for "The Emergent Structure of the Online Information Ecosystem" a discussion with David Lazer, Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and Director of the Lazer Lab. The session will moderated by Nate Persily, Co-Director of the CPC and James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

The first part of this presentation examines the emergent and sometimes paradoxical logic of the internet news ecosystem, in particular: (1) collectively, news diets have become far more concentrated in a small number of outlets; (2)  however, individuals have relatively diverse news diets-- almost certainly far more diverse than was plausible pre-Internet (as measured by number of unique content producers); (3) the social-algorithmic curation system of the Internet tends to point people to content with their preferences, sometimes in unlikely places. The greater diversity of consumption of news measured by number of unique outlets may not actually result in diversity of content.

The second part of the presentation will discuss the development of the National Internet Observatory, a large, NSF-supported effort to create a privacy-preserving data collection/data analytic system for the broader research community.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

In person attendance is available to Stanford affiliates and virtual attendance via zoom is open to the public; registration is required.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David Lazer (pronounced Lazar) is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News.

He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees.

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet on Tuesday, January 24th, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for "How Exile Shapes Online Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela" a discussion with Alexandra Siegel, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and faculty affiliate of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab. The session will moderated by Nate Persily, Co-Director of the CPC and James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

How does exile affect online dissent? We argue that exile not only fragments opposition movements but fundamentally alters how they express opposition by internationalizing their networks and removing them from day-to-day life under the regime. Providing the first large-scale, quantitative study of the effects of exile on online dissent, we show that after exile Venezuelan activists 1) increase discussion of and support for foreign-led solutions to Venezuela's political and economic crisis---including military intervention, sanctions, and diplomacy; 2) decrease discussion of local political dynamics; and 3) express harsher criticisms of the Maduro regime. Our analysis of over 5 million tweets sent by 357 activists over seven years suggests that the internationalization of networks is one mechanism by which exile shapes how activists communicate. After exile, activists increase their interactions with foreign entities and international actors and tweet in English at higher rates. Providing temporally granular individual-level measures of activists' behavior, this work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between exile---one of the most ubiquitous yet understudied forms of repression---and dissent in the digital age.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

In person attendance is available to Stanford affiliates and virtual attendance via zoom is open to the public; registration is required.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alexandra Siegel is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a faculty affiliate of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab. She received her PhD in Political Science from NYU in 2018. Her research uses social media data, network analysis, and experiments—in addition to more traditional data sources—to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts. She is a former non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute, Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Bachelors in International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University.

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet on Tuesday, January 17th, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for "Cybersecurity Enforcement: If Government Regulation Is Going to Increase, How Will It Be Enforced?" a discussion with James Dempsey, Senior Policy Advisor for the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (GTG). The session will moderated by Andrew Grotto, Director of GTG.

As regulators and legislators at both the federal and state level expand their attention to cybersecurity with guidelines, rulemaking and potential legislation, they confront the question of how to enforce any standards they pronounce. The U.S. approach so far has depended mainly on post-incident investigations and enforcement actions by regulators. While crucial, these take place after the damage has been done. Private party litigation is a blunt instrument that rarely, if ever, yields a judgment on the merits of an entity's cybersecurity program. What mix of alternatives should be deployed? GTG Senior Policy Advisor Jim Dempsey will explore enforcement options, including government audits, third party certifications, and insurance company underwriting standards.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

For a full list of dates, speakers and topics, see the Winter Seminar page and register for sessions of interest.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jim Dempsey is senior policy advisor to the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance and a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches a course on cybersecurity law in the LLM program. Until May 2021, Jim was Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. In 2012, after Senate confirmation, he was appointed by President Barack Obama as a part-time member of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency within the federal government charged with advising senior policymakers and overseeing the nation’s counterterrorism programs. He served in that position until January 2017, while also running BCLT.

From 1997 to 2014, Dempsey was at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit public policy organization focused on privacy and other issues affecting the internet, where he held a number of leadership positions. Prior to that he was deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies (1995-1997) and assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Committee (1985-1995), focusing on privacy, FBI oversight, and surveillance issues. 

Jim graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School.

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet, for a discussion with Florence G'sell, Professor of Law at University of Lorraine and Chair of the Sciences Po Digital Governance and Sovereignty Chair, on the new report of the Council of Europe, The Impact of Blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law.

Blockchain technology presents an opportunity for governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, industry stakeholders, and, more generally, members of the public to engage in the recognition of and respect for human rights as well as to resolve current human rights issues. Although the technology is most often associated with cryptocurrencies and other financial instruments or assets, development of decentralized applications and “smart contracts” also allows for the deployment of systems to manage anything from digital identities to medical records, land titles and zoning registries, intellectual property rights, digital identity, voting systems, supply chain and aid.

The report entitled “The Impact of Blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law” explores the risks and potential benefits of blockchain technology for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It presents different use opportunities in line with the Council of Europe’s global democratic agenda to advance democratic functions and ensure accountability and transparency. The report also discusses some of the legal issues that may arise from the use of this technology, with emphasis on matters that may welcome leadership from the Council of Europe in regards to the protection of anonymity and privacy rights; the legal status of automated contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations; and the conflict of law and jurisdiction due to the distributed and global nature.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

For a full list of dates, speakers and topics, see the Winter Seminar page and register for sessions of interest.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Florence G’SELL is a professor of private law at the University of Lorraine and leads the Digital, Governance and Sovereignty Chair at Sciences Po. She began her academic career working mainly on tort law, judicial systems and comparative law. For the past several years, she has been working on digital law and in particular on issues related to the regulation of on line platforms, the way law can deal with new technologies (Blockchain, Metaverse), the notion of digital sovereignty and, more generally, digital policies in the EU and the US.

She has edited and published several books on digital issues, including Le Big Data et le Droit (Dalloz, 2021) and Justice Numérique (Dalloz, 2022). Recently, she published “Les réseaux sociaux, entre encadrement et auto-régulation” (Sciences Po, Digital, Governance and Sovereignty Chair, 2021), “AI Judges” (in Larry A. Dimatteo, Cristina Poncibo, Michel Cannarsa (edit. ), The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Global Perspectives on Law and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2022), and co-authored the Council of Europe report entitled “The Impact of Blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law” (with Florian Martin-Bariteau, 2022).

Florence G’sell is a graduate of Sciences Po and holds the French “agrégation de droit privé et sciences criminelles”. She has been invited several times at the University of Chicago and, more recently, at Stanford University. At Sciences Po, she teaches the course “Comment pensent les juristes” to undergraduate students and the course “Comparative Approach to Big Tech Regulation” in the Master of Public Policy of the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs.

A wealth of recent political science research focuses on how media consolidation under state rule can exacerbate democratic erosion, among other things by limiting access to narratives that counter the government's viewpoint. Hungary is one of the most frequently cited examples of this corrosive media effect. We disagree with the corrosion hypothesis, and seek to test the individual-level effects of providing information that counters the government narrative through a survey experiment. This lecture will describe the problem, our proposal, and what we expect to discover.

Jason Wittenberg is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Academy Scholar at Harvard University, he has been a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Professor Wittenberg’s broad area of focus is the politics and history of Eastern Europe. He has published widely on topics including electoral behavior, ethnic and religious violence, historical legacies, and empirical research methods. His first book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge, 2006), won the 2009 Hubert Morken award for the best political science book published on religion and politics. He is the co-author, most recently, of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell, 2018), winner of the 2019 Bronislaw Malinowski Award in the Social Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current projects explore liberal democratic erosion and the logic of historical persistence.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by March 2, 2023.