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.

 

In this talk, Evelyn Douek argues that the stylized picture of content moderation that dominates academic, public and regulatory discourse needs reframing. In this picture, content moderation is a process in which social media platforms write legislative-style substantive rules and apply them in individual cases. This standard picture of content moderation is a striking analogue to offline judicial adjudication of speech rights and, as a result, leads regulators and scholars to assume that the best way to vindicate speech interests online is through the kind of ex post individual review provided by courts in First Amendment cases.

But this assumption is mistaken. The most important decisions about content moderation are ex ante and systemic. These decisions are made by a wide range of actors and institutions that determine how speech flows through platforms and they promote multiple goals of governance, not merely individual justice. To make content moderation as a whole accountable, and not merely a narrow slice of it, the standard picture needs to be expanded and online speech governance needs to be made more ex ante and systemic. This presentation outlines the standard picture of content moderation, what it misses, and how regulators should therefore borrow from the tools and principles of the administrative state instead when thinking about how to rein in platforms and resist the allure of First Amendment analogies.

Evelyn Douek is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Visiting Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She studies online speech regulation and platform governance. Before coming to Harvard to complete a Master of Laws, Evelyn clerked for the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, the Hon. Justice Susan Kiefel, and worked as a corporate litigator. She received her LL.B. from UNSW Sydney, where she was Executive Editor of the UNSW Law Journal.
 

REGISTER

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

 

*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Sherri Rose, PhD  is an Associate Professor of Health Policy at the Stanford School of Medicine and Co-Director of the Health Policy Data Science Lab. Her research is centered on developing and integrating innovative statistical machine learning approaches to improve human health and health equity. Within health policy, Dr. Rose works on risk adjustment, ethical algorithms in health care, comparative effectiveness research, and health program evaluation. She has published interdisciplinary projects across varied outlets, including Biometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Health Economics, Health Affairs, and New England Journal of Medicine. In 2011, Dr. Rose coauthored the first book on machine learning for causal inference, with a sequel text released in 2018. She has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biostatistics since 2019.

Dr. Rose has been honored with an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the ISPOR Bernie J. O'Brien New Investigator Award, and multiple mid-career awards, including the Gertrude M. Cox Award and the Mortimer Spiegelman Award, the nation’s highest honor in biostatistics, given to a statistician younger than 40 who has made the most significant contributions to public health statistics. She was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2020 and received the 2021 Mortimer Spiegelman Award, which recognizes the statistician under age 40 who has made the most significant contributions to public health statistics. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Boston Globe. 

Title: New and Ongoing Projects at the Interface of Machine Learning for Health Policy

 

Title: Customer Discrimination and Quality Signals: A Field Experiment with Healthcare Shoppers

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that customer discrimination in the market for doctors can be largely accounted for by statistical discrimination. I evaluate customer preferences in the field with an online platform where cash-paying consumers can shop and book a provider for medical procedures based on an experimental paradigm called validated incentivized conjoint analysis (VIC). Customers evaluate doctor options they know to be hypothetical to be matched with a customized menu of real doctors, preserving incentives. Racial discrimination reduces patient willingness-to-pay for black and Asian providers by 12.7% and 8.7% of the average colonoscopy price respectively; customers are willing to travel 100–250 miles to see a white doctor instead of a black doctor, and somewhere between 50–100 to 100–250 miles to see a white doctor instead of an Asian doctor. Further, providing signals of provider quality reduces this willingness-to-pay racial gap by about 90%, which suggests that statistical discrimination is an important cause of the gap. Actual booking behavior allows cross-validation of incentive compatibility of stated preference elicitation via VIC. 

Alex Chan, MPH

Alex Chan is a PhD candidate in Health Economics, and a Gerhard Casper Stanford Graduate Fellow. He has research interests in health economics, experimental economics, market design, and labor economics. His projects look at the causes and consequences of discrimination and diversity in medicine, U.S. Health Policy (especially organ transplantation), and market design in health policy and medicine. He holds an MPH from Harvard University. Before Stanford, he developed extensive experience in the healthcare industry starting as a McKinsey consultant, and most recently as Senior Vice President of Market Strategy with Optum/UnitedHealth before joining academia.

Personal Website: https://www.alexchan.net 

Timothy J. Layton, PhD

Associate Professor of Health Care Policy, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School

His research focuses on the economics of health insurance markets with particular emphasis on understanding insurer behavior in those markets and designing optimal health plan payment systems. 

Dr. Layton and his collaborators are using economic models of health insurer behavior to design payment systems that combat inefficiencies caused by adverse selection. In one project, he and his coauthors are deriving new methods for designing health plan payment systems that set payments to insurers in a way that discourages insurers from inefficiently rationing care used by sick individuals with multiple chronic conditions. This work focuses on designing payment systems for the state and federal Health Insurance Marketplaces, as well as the Dutch health insurance market and the Medicare Advantage program.

Stay Tuned for Details

Achyuta Adhvaryu, PhD. 

Alexander M. Nick Professor
Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy
University of Michigan, Ross Schoo lof Business 

 

Stay Tuned for Details

Amanda Starc, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management
Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Professor Amanda Starc received her BA in Economics from Case Western Reserve University, and her PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. Dr. Starc's research interests include industrial organization and health economics. Her research examines the Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Medicare Supplement ("Medigap") markets, as well as consumer behavior in insurance exchanges. Recent work measures the effectiveness of direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. Her work links models of consumer choice and supply side incentives, and uses a range of econometric techniques to analyze data.

This will be an in-person event: Encina Commons, Conference Rom 119, with a boxed lunch served.

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.