What The Multistakeholder Approach Can Bring to Content Policy Debates
PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES
Join us via Zoom on Tue, September 28th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for a conversation with PDI fellows, Julie Owono and Dr Niousha Roshani, moderated by Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center, Nathaniel Persily, as they discuss the challenges to content policy and the solutions that a multistakeholder approach has to offer. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
The multistakeholder governance model is increasingly presented as a solution for addressing content governance issues online. While this inclusive and collaborative approach mirrors the foundational principle of an “open and free internet”, challenges with online content around scale and rapidity notably, call for further experimentation.
The Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL), a new project of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center (CPC), aims to be one of these experiments - by creating a safe space for a diverse array of stakeholders from government, the private sector, civil society, and academia to share knowledge and collaborate on solutions.
Moderator: Nathaniel Persily, Co-Director, Cyber Policy Center
Speakers: Julie Owono, PDI Fellow and Niousha Roshani, PDI Fellow
Nathaniel Persily
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.
