In recent years, social media’s role in shaping social discourse has become more evident than ever. A global pandemic fueled by misinformation, an insurrection orchestrated online, and many other global events reminded us that the way in which social media companies outline their rules and practices directly affects the way we interact, behave and exchange ideas within a society. By shaping social media, we do, in fact, shape society.

At the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy (MIP), I research how policymakers can enhance the positive outcomes of social media and mitigate the risks they pose. It is clear today that this task is not one government can take on alone. Regulating Big Tech is just not enough. Only combined efforts of governmental and private entities can successfully tackle the great challenges introduced by online platforms. During my summer internship as a Public Policy Intern at the Oversight Board, I examined the role of non-governmental forms of online platform regulation.

The Oversight Board is an independent body of 20 global experts that examine the most significant and difficult content moderation decisions made by Facebook. In each case, the Board determines whether Facebook’s decision to take down a post or keep it up was in line with the platform’s Community Standards and values, and with International Human Rights Standards. Within 90 days of taking a case, the Board issues a binding decision on whether a piece of content should remain on the platform and a set of policy recommendations Facebook must respond to within 30 days. To date, the Board issued 14 decisions, including the widely-discussed case regarding the removal of former president Donald Trump from the platform.

While the Board’s policy recommendations are not binding, the transparent nature in which Facebook responds to them encourages adoption, and in practice, the platform has adopted most recommendations to date. For example, in August, Facebook announced that following a recommendation by the Board, the platform will start notifying users when it identifies that content violates its Community Standards through a governmental referral. This development, long advocated for by digital rights organizations, will help users identify frequent government censorship.

The Board is a unique organization not only in its novel approach to social media regulation, but also because of its global impact on every Facebook user regardless of borders and jurisdictions. As such, the Board should reflect the diverse user base of the platform, and it does. As part of the communication team, I was able to work with leading digital rights professionals from around the world and with team members to help facilitate engagement with stakeholders from every part of the globe. This included identifying global and regional stakeholders who have a particular interest in the Board’s cases and encouraging them to participate in deliberations by submitting public comments. These comments help the Board consider the wide range of perspectives and contexts of each case. I worked on a case involving content relating to the Israeli-Palestinian surge of violence in May 2021 and a Policy Advisory Opinion about the disclosure of private residential addresses. 

Through my internship, I was able to better understand the unique role the Oversight Board has in the overall regulatory framework of social media. Many criticize the Board for its narrow scope and limited impact. These arguments have merit, but I also witnessed firsthand how the Board’s efforts have guided crucial changes to Facebook’s policies, including on contentious issues where users from different regions have virtually contradictory concerns. Such changes could not, and should not, have been mandated by governments. While not a solution to all the problems posed by social media, I can appreciate today that the Oversight Board has a critical and unique role in solving some of them. In the current state of social media regulation, that should not be underestimated.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is a regional economic forum with 21 member economies, including the US, China, and Russia, headquartered in Singapore. As a summer graduate intern at APEC, I worked closely with APEC’s policy unit that oversees and conducts policy research and analysis for publications and reports, which are used as key discussion agendas in ministerial level discussions and conferences. The Policy Support Unit (PSU)’s core areas of work are 1) trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, 2) structural reform, 3) connectivity including supply chain connectivity and global supply chains, 4) economic and financial analysis, and 5) sustainable economic development. During my summer internship, I was able to gain direct experience with almost all of these core areas through conducting quantitative and qualitative research.

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The PSU has been working on a publication that analyzed the impacts of travel restrictions during the pandemic. The report provided evidence and policy recommendations for APEC economies to resume cross-border travel in a safe and equitable way. I was tasked to draft two sections of the report, including a literature review of various multilateral organizations’ initiatives on safe re-opening, and an analysis of the disproportionate impacts of travel restrictions on vulnerable population, especially women. Women were not only experiencing economic impacts from border closures, such as loss of jobs and business closures, but women seeking abortion procedures in countries with restrictive regulations faced significant challenges when cross-border travel was limited to “essential workers.” Such challenges were even more pronounced for lower-income women or women with disabilities who may not be able to access services through other means domestically. 

I also worked on drafting APEC’s flagship publication, APEC in Charts 2021, which resides within APEC’s fourth core area of work, economic and financial analysis. APEC in Charts is an annual publication that provides a visual overview of the region’s economic, trade and investment performance. Using data from international organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations, I calculated aggregate statistics for the APEC region on the following indicators: trend in trade, tariff liberalization indicators such as free trade agreements, trend in FDI inflows and outflows, COVID-19 vaccination status, and various sustainability indicators such as household food waste and greenhouse gas emissions trends.

Since APEC includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, both of which did not have disaggregated data, the most challenging part of this task was to locate and calculate the information using limited data. While data disaggregation was challenging, I was thankful for all those nights that I stayed up in the first quarter to complete data aggregation for economic analysis assignments for the Global Economy course, INTLPOL 302, which built a foundation for key skills required at APEC.

I also immersed myself in the topic of climate change over the summer. Policy actions on climate change became one of the center of APEC’s agendas to build economic resilience post-COVID. I drafted a section on climate change in APEC’s Regional Trends Analysis (ARTA) report by conducting quantitative and qualitative research on green indicators. Calculating carbon emissions was one challenge, but comparing how much each economy had pledged to reduce emissions and what it would actually take to keep global warming below 2°C was another challenge. 

Climate change was not a topic I was very familiar with from a research standpoint, but I took the opportunity to self-educate through reading various literature, including the most recent publication from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was striking that more than 60% of global greenhouse gases were generated by APEC economies. Unless APEC as a region curbs cumulative emissions, the expected repercussions are disastrous. Again, the most vulnerable – including women and girls, migrants, those in poverty, mountain communities and people in urban slums – will experience more severe consequences, and the repercussions are even more pronounced for those in developing nations.

This 11-week internship experience at APEC over the summer was a rewarding one that helped me understand the way multilateral organizations work. I was motivated by working with an organization responsible for shaping economic policies through cooperation to build resilience in the post-COVID world. Plus, I was able to tone up key techniques learned from MIP’s core courses such as STATA and advanced excel skills. Although it was a remote internship, I benefited from learning from my fellow interns and co-researchers on their broad range of expertise and experience. I strongly recommend future MIP students work with APEC over the summer as policy interns!

In a multipolar international system during the era of technology disruption, international security continues to be fragile. Whether overtly or covertly, ambitious states have been competing to obtain a comparative advantage over the one-another, such as China and the United States. While governments rely on national technical means (NTM) on tracking other states’ actions, the implications of this competition would ultimately fall on the general population. The ubiquitous nature of international security has inspired many academic experts, private organizations, and corporations to develop open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis with the purpose of improving transparency and expanding NTM capacities. Of the most prominent OSINT fields is geospatial intelligence and imagery analysis, which has come a long way through increased cooperation with commercial data providers, particularly satellite companies.

Over the last decade, the quality of imagery collection has increased in both spatial and temporal resolution. While the former allows for the discerning of smaller objects captured on the surface of Earth and positive identification of them, the latter allows for monitoring of sites on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Therefore, both are required for a comprehensive analysis of the site of interest and proper academic practice.

Over the summer, I worked with Allison Puccioni, a career imagery analyst and a consultant at BlackSky, who provided me an opportunity to cooperate with BlackSky and Planet, two of the leading commercial satellite companies on the salient issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). An article from The Drive released on July 14, 202, sparked interest in a remote facility in Xinjiang, China just south of Bosten Lake.The functionality of the facility is still disputed, but the structural features suggest that it may be a directed-energy weapons (DEW) development facility. As no previous research on this facility had been conducted, we decided to conduct a comprehensive analysis together with Allison and Katharine Leede, a senior majoring in Political Science and part of the CISAC Undergraduate Honors Program.

This analysis required the acquisition of extensive imagery of the site, which was available only at BlackSky through their global monitoring program. BlackSky was more than willing to share the imagery with us in an effort to establish academic-private sector cooperation. The data consisted of 400 images of the site spanning from mid-2019 to August 2021. To manage this large amount of data, we went through every single image, noting any key features and tracking them over time. The image below depicts an aerial view of the Bosten Lake Facility, which is characterized by the presence of large hangars with retractable roofs. The imagery is also of high temporal resolution, up to 10 images a day in some cases. This frequency allows us to create a pattern-of-life where we identified the times and days of the week the hangars would be open. Assuming that the current hypothesis is that this facility is a DEW testing site, we can infer that the tests were conducted when the hangars were open. However, further analysis is required to confirm this statement. After compiling the pattern-of-life analysis, we needed to identify the objects inside the hangars in order to confirm our hypothesis.

While BlackSky imagery has an unmatched temporal resolution, it comes at the cost of spatial resolution. Therefore, we identified key images in which activity at the site was at its highest and requested those images from Planet. Planet’s SkySat satellite constellation has a resolution of 0.5 meters, allowing one to identify small objects in the image. This technique we used is generally referred to in the intelligence community as Low-to-High Resolution Tipping and Cueing. This is the process of monitoring an area or an object of interest by a sensor and requesting “tipping” another complementary sensor platform to acquire “cueing” an image over the same area.

This project has also attracted interest from major defense-related media outlets, most notably Janes Intelligence Review (JIR). Upon completion, this project will result in a published article in JIR and is scheduled for the December 2021 edition. Additionally, the project received attention from the Defense Innovation Unit in the U.S. Department of Defense, whose representatives expressed interest in establishing cooperation for future projects.

This internship provided  me an opportunity to be one of the first people to analyze an emerging case study such as the Bosten Lake Facility in China and learn how to work with commercial satellite companies. As a military officer in the Kosovar Army, I will have to deal with public-private partnerships, and the connections I have made together with the communication and networking skills I acquired will contribute to a more successful career. Additionally, geospatial intelligence analysis will be included in my job description as an intelligence officer, thus having had the chance to practice the necessary skills in both an academic and corporate setting will greatly aid me in the future.

Finally, the UNDPPA internship also allowed me to be part of the pioneering team for an environmental security project in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The project was initiated as a result of negotiations between the UNDPPA and DPRK, and environmental security became the only area of mutual interest that will further facilitate cooperation from the DPRK government. As the framework for this project was only developed this summer, it is still an ongoing process requiring coordination between policymakers, diplomats, DPRK representatives, and the engineering team who realizes the requirements put forward into a platform similar to the Iraq Water Security Project. As I have had the opportunity to be present during the creation of this project, I will be looking forward to contributing to its development and seeing the result.

Imagine this.

You were studying or interning abroad. Or you were on a vacation somewhere outside of your home country. You were enjoying life as usual, and suddenly news came in that your country had shut down completely and that the military has taken over the political leadership, arresting hundreds of government officials and other civilians. While you are still in shock, the internet and phone lines were cut off. You have now lost contact with your families and friends. So, there you sat — scrolling through an empty Facebook timeline, with empty hope that there might be some breakthrough access. You dial all the numbers you have available, wishing to hear a familiar voice on the other end, yet only to no avail.

As a Myanmar student abroad, this is only a glimpse of what I have been going through since the military staged a coup d’état on February 1, 2021. Every single day, I am surrounded by the political turmoil and violence that is directly impacting my family and friends in Myanmar. So, when I was choosing an internship for this summer, I made sure to pick an institution where I can work on issues that are close to home. And I have known about the Asia Foundation’s work on Myanmar since a few years ago as I had to use some of their conflict reports for my research projects. So, TAF has been one of my top choices for the summer internship, and I applied to the Asia Foundation’s Conflict and Fragility team in Thailand. Just as I was hoping, with TAF, I am able to work independently on a topic of my interest regarding pre-existing conflict and newly arising political turmoil in Myanmar.

The original hope has been to work in their Thailand office in-person. As summer approached, however, with the restrictions around COVID-19, this plan did not materialize. Instead, working remotely came with its own perks. I could not have imagined going into work on a nine-to-five schedule and pretending as if my beloved home city was not collapsing, which it was. Explosions and assassinations now mark everyday life in my city, Yangon. My close friends have joined armed resistance. Some friends had fled the country, while some got arrested. In July, as the military was rounding up doctors and healthcare workers and shutting down oxygen and other medical supplies, my own mother become ill with COVID-19 and was in critical condition for several days. And she had to get treated at home while running from the military as she was on the watchlist released. As all of this took a tremendous mental toll on me, working from home independently allowed me to be flexible, to be kind to myself, and to work on different projects at my own time. Moreover, I was able to connect with the Burmese community in the Bay Area over the summer, attending Burma-related fundraisers and protests.

Additionally, being very familiar with the context of political turmoil in Myanmar, my supervisors were extremely kind and supportive in many ways. From getting feedback about my research proposals and ideas to talking about what is happening in general, I was able to learn about different perspectives on the issues around Myanmar, while also discovering many areas of conflict research that I did not know about before. Their expertise on the conflict issues in the country and the region also helped me to put a check on my own biases when dealing with the issues around Myanmar. I feel so grateful and fortunate to be able to work with my colleagues for this summer, and I could not even imagine working at a different place in this situation.