Image

Join host Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center, as she brings together experts from the space, to speak about what can be done to encourage platforms like Facebook to stop the spread of hate and disinformation. 

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

Maritje Schaake: Marietje Schaake is the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She was named President of the Cyber Peace Institute. Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs and technology policies. Marietje is affiliated with a number of non-profits including the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Observer Research Foundation in India and writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and a bi-monthly column for the Dutch NRC newspaper. 

Jessica Gonzalez: An accomplished attorney and racial-justice advocate, Jessica works closely with the executive team and key stakeholders to develop and execute strategies to advance Free Press’ mission. A former Lifeline recipient, Jessica has helped fend off grave Trump administration cuts to the program, which helps provide phone-and-internet access for low-income people. She was part of the legal team that overturned a Trump FCC decision blessing runaway media consolidation. She also co-founded Change the Terms, a coalition of more than 50 civil- and digital-rights groups that works to disrupt online hate. Previously, Jessica was the executive vice president and general counsel at the National Hispanic Media Coalition, where she led the policy shop and helped coordinate campaigns against racist and xenophobic media programming. Prior to that she was a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Public Representation. Jessica has testified before Congress on multiple occasions, including during a Net Neutrality hearing in the House while suffering from acute morning sickness, and during a Senate hearing while eight months pregnant to advocate for affordable internet access.

David Sifry: As Vice President of the Center for Technology and Society (CTS), Dave Sifry leads a team of innovative technologists, researchers, and policy experts developing proactive solutions and producing cutting-edge research to protect vulnerable populations. In its efforts to advocate change at all levels of society, CTS serves as a vital resource to legislators, journalists, universities, community organizations, tech platforms and anyone who has been a target of online hate and harassment. Dave joined ADL in 2019 after a storied career as a technology entrepreneur and executive. He founded six companies including Linuxcare and Technorati, and served in executive roles at companies including Lyft and Reddit. In addition to his entrepreneurial work, Dave was selected as a Technology Pioneer at The World Economic Forum, and is an advisor and mentor for a select group of companies and startup founders. As the son of a hidden child of the Holocaust, the core values and mission exemplified by ADL were instilled in him at an early age.

Image

Dr. Amy Orben is College Research Fellow at Emmanuel College and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Her work using large-scale datasets to investigate social media use and teenage mental health has been published in a range of leading scientific journals. The results have put into question many long-held assumptions about the potential risks and benefits of ’screen time'. Alongside her research, Amy campaigns for the use of improved statistical methodology in the behavioural sciences and the adoption of more transparent and open scientific practices, having co-founded the global ReproducibiliTea initiative. Amy also regularly contributes to both media and policy debate, having recently given evidence to the UK Commons Science and Technology Select Committee and various governmental investigations.

Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is a Professor in the Department 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.

Erica Pelavin, is an educator, public speaker, and Co-Founder and Director of Teen Engagement at My Digital TAT2. Working from a strength-based perspective, Erica has expertise in bullying prevention, relational aggression, digital safety, social emotional learning, and conflict resolution. Dr. Pelavin has a passion for helping young people develop the skills to become their own advocates and cares deeply about helping school communities foster empathy and respect. In her role at My Digital TAT2, Erica leads all programming for high schoolers including the youth led podcast Media in the Middle, the teen advisory boards and an annual summer internship program. Her work with teens directly impacts and informs the developmental school based curriculum. Erica is also a high school counselor at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, CA.

Watch the recorded session

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.