Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford, for a look at how platforms shape the media and society.
 
Based on analysis of the relations between platform companies including Google and Meta, and news publishers in France, Germany, the UK, and the US, the session will explore key aspects of the “platform power” a few technology companies have come to exercise in public life, the reservations news publishers have about platforms—and the reasons why they often embrace them anyway.
 
This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virtual attendance is available; registration is required.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford. He was previously Director of Research at the Reuters Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

His work focuses on changes in the news media, on political communication, and the role of digital technologies in both. He has done extensive research on journalism, American politics, and various forms of activism, and a significant amount of comparative work in Western Europe and beyond.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Dr. Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and Emily Dreyfuss, a journalist who covers the impact of technology on society, with a focus on social media and information systems.

Memes have long been dismissed as inside jokes with no political importance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memes are bedrock to the strategy of conspiracists such as Alex Jones, provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, and tacticians like Roger Stone. While the media and most politicians struggle to harness the organizing power of the internet, the “redpill right” weaponizes memes, pushing conspiracy theories and disinformation into the mainstream to drag people down the rabbit hole. These meme wars stir strong emotions, deepen partisanship, and get people off their keyboards and into the streets--and the steps of the US Capitol. 

Meme Wars is the first major account of how “Stop the Steal” went from online to real life, from the wires to the weeds. Leading media expert Joan Donovan, PhD, veteran tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss, and cultural ethnographer Brian Friedberg pull back the curtain on the digital war rooms in which a vast collection of antiesablishmentarians bond over hatred of liberal government and media. Together as a motley reactionary army, they use memes and social media to seek out new recruits, spread ideologies, and remake America according to their desires.

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virtual attendance is available; registration is required.

Dr. Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns.

Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC). TaSC explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.

Emily Dreyfuss is a journalist who covers the impact of technology on society, with a focus on social media and information systems. She is the senior editor of the Technology and Social Change (TaSC) team and the co-lead of the Harvard Shorenstein Center News Leaders summit. Emily got her start in journalism as a local newspaper reporter, then as an editor at an alt-weekly, before entering the tech reporting fray as an editor at CNET. She was a senior writer and editor at WIRED for many years and most recently helped launch the tech news site Protocol. As a 2017-2018 Harvard Nieman Berkman Klein fellow, Emily studied ephemerality and the internet. She is interested in how technology accelerates change.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, for the next seminar in the Fall Seminar Series, Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Algorithmic Bias: How YouTube Recommends Content to Real Users with Joshua Tucker, Professor of Politics, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, Co-Director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics(CSMaP), Affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and Affiliated Professor of Data Science.

To what extent does the YouTube recommendation algorithm push users into echo chambers, ideologically biased content, or rabbit holes? Despite growing popular concern, recent work suggests that the recommendation algorithm is not pushing users into these echo chambers. However, existing research relies heavily on the use of anonymous data collection that does not account for the personalized nature of the recommendation algorithm. We asked a sample of real users to install a browser extension that downloaded the list of videos they were recommended. We instructed these users to start on an assigned video and then click through 20 sets of recommendations, capturing what they were being shown in real time as they used the platform logged into their real accounts. Using a novel method to estimate the ideology of a YouTube video, we demonstrate that the YouTube recommendation algorithm does, in fact, push real users into mild ideological echo chambers where, by the end of the data collection task, liberals and conservatives received different distributions of recommendations from each other, though this difference is small. While we find evidence that this difference increases the longer the user followed the recommendation algorithm, we do not find evidence that many go down `rabbit holes' that lead them to ideologically extreme content. Finally, we find that YouTube pushes all users, regardless of ideology, towards moderately conservative and an increasingly narrow range of ideological content the longer they follow YouTube's recommendations.

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series from the Program on Democracy and the Internet, designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virtual attendance is available; registration is required. Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees. 

About the Speaker:

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University.  He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia. He is one of the co-founders and co-Directors of the NYU  Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory. 

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Tim Hwang, General Counsel of Substack, for a look at how microeconomics and disinformation are connected. Despite the tendency to wildly speculate on the future of disinformation and next-generation psychological operations, the vast majority of propagandists are rank pragmatists. How might microeconomic principles help us understand how disinformation campaigns are actually organized, and the kinds of tactics they are likely to deploy going into the future? This session will explore some early research exploring the small but critical incentives that shape tactical decisionmaking around disinformation efforts, and how such a framework might be used to ground threat modeling going forwards. 

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virutal attendance is available; registration is required.

About the Speaker:

Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher, currently the general counsel at Substack. He’s the author of Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the online advertising bubble. He’s a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is on the board of Meedan, and is an investor in Temescal Brewing. Previous work includes serving as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest. He also was the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google.

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modernization.

This paper, co-authored with Stephen E. Hanson, identifies the patrimonial phenomenon and explores the contemporary global diffusion of patrimonial rule from its origins in postcommunist Russia, which in the 1990s faced precisely the same social challenges—shrinking “blue collar” industries, sharply increasing economic inequality, and weak, unresponsive democratic institutions—that would bedevil developed countries around the world in the 21st century.  From Russia, patrimonialism spread westward to the “near abroad,” the new EU member states, Israel, and ultimately to the erstwhile heartland of the rule of law: the UK and the US. Some signs indicate that reestablishing bureaucratic predictability and expertise may be much harder than demolishing it. In some respects, the task may be more daunting than the salvation of democracy itself.

Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history.  These interests are central topics in his co-authored book, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and his forthcoming edited volume: "Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust" (Cornell University Press 2023). His current book project is "The Good Deep State: How the Global Patrimonial Wave Endangers our Future."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 3, 2022.

Over the last decade, responses to the crisis of democracy have been hampered by the fact that challenges to liberalism have often been subtle and ambiguous. All this changed on 24 February 2022. Two factors made Russia’s invasion a watershed moment in Europe’s battle for democracy: the stark moral clarity of Ukraine’s cause and the existential security threat presented by a newly aggressive Russia.  As a result, the West has responded in a far more unified manner than anyone expected.

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Way also has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Slavic Review, Studies in Comparative and International Development, World Politics, as well as in a number of area studies journals and edited volumes. His 2005 article in World Politics was awarded the Best Article Award in the “Comparative Democratization” section of the American Political Science Association in 2006. He is Co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine and is Co-Chair of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Democracy. He has held fellowships at Harvard University (Harvard Academy and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies), and the University of Notre Dame (Kellogg Fellowship).

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 27, 2022.