Join us on Tuesday, April 5th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “What Facebook and Instagram Users Tell Us About Misinformation” featuring Hubert Etienne, Philosopher and Researcher, Ecole Normale Supérieure and Meta AI in conversation with Julie Owono, Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About The Seminar: 

Social media users who report content are key allies in the management of online misinformation. However, no research has been conducted yet to understand their role and the different trends underlying their reporting activity. Hubert Etienne presents an original approach to studying misinformation by examining it from the reporting users’ perspective at the content-level and comparatively across regions and platforms. This leads Etienne to propose the first classification of reported content pieces, resulting from a review of items reported on Facebook and Instagram in France, the UK, and the US in June 2020 to observe meaningful distinctions regarding misinformation reporting between countries and platforms as it significantly varies in volume, type, topic, and manipulation technique. Etienne identifies four reporting behaviors, from which he derives four types of noise capable of explaining the majority of the inaccuracy in misinformation reporting. He finally shows that breaking down the user reporting signal into a plurality of behaviors allows us to build a simple classifier trained on a small dataset with a combination of basic users-reports capable of identifying these different types of noise.

Speakers:

Hubert Etienne is a philosopher conducting research in AI ethics and computational philosophy at École Normale Supérieure and Meta AI. His research focuses on social interactions, especially the moderation of problematic interactions in cyberspace. He is a lecturer in AI ethics à Sciences Po, in data economics at HEC Paris and in digital regulation at the National School of Administration. He is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

Julie Owono is the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL) and a fellow of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. She is also the Executive Director of digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières, one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar.

CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. For our final Spring 2022 seminar, please join us to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research.

Adrian Scheibler, Firestone Medal winner
 

Major: International Relations
Thesis Advisor: Christophe Crombez

Thesis Title: Challenging the State: Western European Regionalism in the Era of Financial Crisis

Abstract: The Global Financial Crisis and its aftershocks have substantially altered the Western European political landscape. But while the literature has extensively focused on the impacts of the economic hardship on traditional party competition, it has often failed to consider the center-periphery dimension. My thesis addresses both the demand for and supply of regionalist ideologies during the crisis. Using an original dataset containing 8 countries, 35 regions, and 128 regionalist parties, it finds that voters did not increase their support for regionalist parties during the crisis and may have even turned their backs on these political actors. In addition, I consider the reactions of regionalist parties in three Spanish autonomous communities - Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia - to the crisis. I find evidence of regionalist mobilization on the issue and even some indications of radicalization of regionalist demands. Taken together, these findings raise interesting implications for the impacts of the financial crisis and the interaction between economic indicators, party competition, and voting patterns.

 

Michal Skreta, CDDRL Outstanding Thesis winner
 

 

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

Congress has just passed legislation requiring owners and operators of critical infrastructure to notify the federal government following a cyber breach. The requirement, made more urgent by fears that Russia’s war with Ukraine will spill over into attacks on America's energy, financial, and other critical infrastructure, is the latest entry to the growing catalog of cybersecurity-related laws, including new state measures and proposed Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements.  

Policymakers at the state and federal level continue to search for the right balance of collaboration and enforcement. This one-hour session will explore recent developments in cybersecurity law, offering both pragmatic advice on compliance and litigation strategy as well as big picture insights on the direction of U.S. cybersecurity policy. 

Travis LeBlanc is the vice chair of the cyber/data/privacy practice at Cooley and a Senate-confirmed member of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. He has guided leading tech corporations through enforcement proceedings and class action lawsuits.

 

Alicia Lowery Rosenbaum is Vice President and Associate General Counsel for Cybersecurity Technology and Trust at Salesforce, where she provides strategic counsel on risk management and governance to the company's security engineering and operations teams.

Jim Dempsey is a Senior Policy Advisor for the Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. He is the author of Cybersecurity Law Fundamentals, a handbook for practitioners published in 2021 by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). 

Moderating the session will be Andrew J. Grotto, Director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and former Senior Director for Cyber Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations.