On Wednesday, October 27 at 10 am Pacific Time, please join Andrew Grotto, Director of Stanford’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, for a conversation with Jacob Helberg, senior adviser at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to discuss his newly released book "The Wires of War:  Technology and the Global Struggle for Power" - an urgent and groundbreaking account of the high-stakes global cyberwar brewing between Western democracies and the autocracies of China and Russia that could potentially crush democracy.

From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google’s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating two-front technology cold war between democracy and autocracy.

On the front-end, we’re fighting to control the software—applications, news information, social media platforms, and more—of what we see on the screens of our computers, tablets, and phones, a clash which started out primarily with Russia but now increasingly includes China and Iran. Even more ominously, we’re also engaged in a hidden back-end battle—largely with China—to control the Internet’s hardware, which includes devices like cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, and 5G networks.

This tech-fueled war will shape the world’s balance of power for the coming century as autocracies exploit twenty-first-century methods to re-divide the world into twentieth century-style spheres of influence. Helberg cautions that the spoils of this fight are power over every meaningful aspect of our lives, including our economy, our infrastructure, our national security, and ultimately, our national sovereignty. Without a firm partnership with the government, Silicon Valley is unable to protect democracy from the autocrats looking to sabotage it from Beijing to Moscow and Tehran. The stakes of the ongoing cyberwar are no less than our nation’s capacity to chart its own future, the freedom of our democratic allies, and even the ability of each of us to control our own fates, Helberg says. And time is quickly running out.

Praise for “The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power”: 

“An analytical tour de force on the rapidly increasing challenge of techno-authoritarian nations to our national security, our economy, and our democracy.” —President Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States

Join the Stanford Internet Observatory, Friday, October 29th at 8 AM pacific, as they host the contributing authors to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. 

The Journal of Online Trust and Safety is a cross-disciplinary, open access, fast peer-reviewed journal publishing research on how consumer internet services cause harm and how to prevent those harms. The journal was conceived from a recognition that much of the cutting-edge research on online harm lacks an appropriate journal for publication. With this journal, we bring together researchers in and outside of academia from diverse fields including communication, computer science, criminology, law, political science, psychology, public policy and sociology. The journal’s rapid review process ensures that published work is timely and relevant. Issues may also include supplementary editorial pieces or journalistic investigations. Each year, the journal will release at least two general issues as well as one themed issue with an accompanying symposium. Priority topics for the journal include: 

• Child exploitation and non-consensual intimate imagery 
• Suicide and self-harm 
• Incitement and terrorism 
• Hate speech and harassment 
• Spam and fraud
• Misinformation and disinformation

 

Moderators:

Shelby Grossman is a Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory

Jeffrey T. Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. 

Speakers:

Jae Yeon Kim is an Assistant Research Scholar at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. 

Anna Van Meter is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Behavioral Science, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and an Assistant Professor at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.

Joshua Tucker is a Professor of Politics at the NYU Wilf Family Department of Politics, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, and a Director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics.

Camille François is a Doctoral Candidate at the French Institute of Geopolitics at University Paris 8, a lecturer at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and an Affiliate at the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Hany Farid is a Professor in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford University and Co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

Brittan Heller is a human rights attorney with expertise in immersive technology, who is counsel in Global Business and Human Rights at Foley Hoag LLP. She is a non-residential fellow at the Atlantic Council focusing on the metaverse.

 

People who use messaging services need to be able to exercise agency in how they communicate. This includes being able to manage privacy trade-offs and also to address unwanted or abusive content such as spam, mis- and disinformation, harassment, and sexually exploitative content. In the current debates around addressing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) environments, technical experts have proposed a variety of approaches to addressing abusive content, including user reporting, metadata analysis, and automated scanning of user-generated content. Given that there are many different kinds of users with unique needs and perceived risks to their online communications, how can we enable meaningful user choice and control around E2EE communications to address unwanted or abusive content?

Panel Speakers:
Riana Pfefferkorn - Stanford Internet Observatory, Research Scholar
Jon Callas - EFF, Director of Technology Projects
Dhanaraj Thakur - CDT, Research Director
Kate D'Adamo - Reframe Health and Justice

Moderator:
Emma Llansó - CDT, Director of Free Expression Project

 

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us on October 19th for our weekly seminar from 12 PM - 1 PM PT featuring Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law at University of Chicago's Law School and CPC Co-Director, Nate Persily. This series is organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

For years now, scholars have expressed alarm at the tendency of government officials to pressure—or “jawbone”—social media companies into taking down what the officials consider to be harmful or offensive speech, even when no law requires it. Scholars have worried, for good reason, that the practice of jawboning allows government officials to evade the stringent constraints on their power to regulate speech imposed by the First Amendment. But relatively little attention has been paid to the constitutional question of whether, or rather when, government jawboning itself violates the First Amendment. In fact, answering this question turns out to be quite difficult because of deep inconsistencies in the cases that deal with jawboning, both in the social media context and beyond. In this talk, I will explore what those inconsistencies are, why the case law is so unclear about where the line between permissible government pressure and unconstitutional governmental coercion falls, and what kind of jawboning rule might be necessary to protect free speech values in a public sphere in which both private companies and government officials possess considerable power to determine who can and cannot speak.

Speaker Profile:

Genevieve Lakier teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on the social media platforms.
 
Genevieve has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the Southern District of New York and Judge Martha C. Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before joining the faculty, Genevieve taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She will serve as the Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight Institute at Columbia University for the 2021-2022 school year, where she will be supervising a project exploring the relationship between the First Amendment and the regulation of lies, disinformation and misinformation.

 

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us at the weekly Cyber Policy Center (CPC) seminar on Tue, October 12th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST featuring Soojong Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet. This session will be moderated by Co-Director of the CPC, Nate Persily. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

There has been growing concern about online misinformation and falsehood. It has been suspected that the proliferation of misleading narratives is especially severe on Facebook, the world’s largest social media site, but there has been a lack of large-scale systematic investigations on these issues. This talk will introduce a series of ongoing research projects investigating online groups promoting misleading narratives on Facebook, including anti-vaccine groups, climate change denialists, countermovements against racial justice movements, and conspiracy theorists. The presentation will discuss the prevalence, characteristics, ecosystem of misleading narratives on Facebook, and implications for potential interventions.

Speaker Profile:

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around digital media, social networks, and information propagation. As a former computer scientist, he is also interested in developing and applying computational methods, including online experiments, large-scale data analysis, and computational modeling.