Berkman Klein Center For Internet And Society: Audio Fishbowl

It all feels like a precursor to a bad joke: What do foreign agents, white supremacists, conspiracists, snake oil salesmen, political operatives, white academics, and a disgruntled bunch of zoomers have in common? The groups have collided in a centrifuge of chaos online, where the tactics they use to hide their identities and manipulate audiences are more prevalent than ever. Social media companies are trying to patch the holes in a failing sociotechnical systems, where the problems their products have created are now shouldered by journalists, universities, and health professionals, just to name a few. What can be done to restore moral and technical order in a time of pandemonium? Joan Donovan answers these questions and more during a presentation and Q&A.

Yochai Benkler and Rob Faris present their recent research that assesses how asymmetrically polarized media in the United States shape political discourse and explains how the structure of media ecosystems sustains two starkly different versions of reality in American politics. This talk draws upon research into the propagation of disinformation about mail-in voter fraud and an analysis of political discourse in the first five months of 2020 from the Democratic primaries and impeachment to the emergence of the pandemic. It is moderated by Jasmine McNealy.

This book talk discussion included: Introduction:  Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, director of the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder and director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. John Palfrey is president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a former faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Dr. Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. His research and teaching activities focus on information law, policy, and society issues and the changing role of academia in the digitally networked age. Moderator:  Leah Plunkett is the Meyer Research Lecturer on Law Special Director for

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change, the National Governors Association, and Partners In Health’s U.S. Public Health Accompaniment Unit hold a session exploring how US state and local public health leaders can implement retrospective contact tracing to identify Covid-19 clusters and mitigate their spread. Currently, almost every US state relies on prospective contact tracing: when an infected person is identified, contact tracers try to identify and notify the infected person’s contacts since being infected. However, there’s an additional, effective method that states can add to their toolkit: retrospective tracing. Once tracers identify an infected person, they can look backwards to find when and where the person was infected and identify who else might have been infected simultaneously as part of a ‘cluster’. Experts are increasingly aware of the outsized effects of superspreader incidents in the

evelyn douek and Julie Owono discuss how platforms are preparing for—and anticipating—a variety of issues related to disinformation in the lead up to, and immediate aftermath of, the 2020 US election on November 3. douek focuses on what platforms have and haven't learned from 2016. Owono explores how this election, and others in the world, will challenge freedom of expression on global social media platforms. This event was moderated by Oumou Ly, Staff Fellow on the Assembly: Disinformation project. Together, they highlight the intricate challenges that platforms are facing and provide insight into what to look for and anticipate in the days to come.

The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its 2020 MacArthur Fellows, which include two BKC Faculty Associates, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Mary Gray. Watch Cottom and Gray discuss their previous and forthcoming projects as well as explore the intersections of their equally impressive research. The event was moderated by Joan Donovan. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science and senior research fellow with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author, most recently, of Thick: And Other Essays. Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. 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 disinformati

How Should U.S. public health officials lead in this political moment? Rivka Weinberg, Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College and Jennifer Prah Ruger, Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss the Covid State of Play.

Board Members James Mickens and Jonathan Zittrain explore cybersecurity beyond its traditional boundaries of protecting data or code from bad actors. Increasingly, the pervasive integration of computing systems into modern societal processes (e.g. news, election results) creates new tensions such as the exponential growth of disinformation. After all, disinformation stems from issues about how users are authenticated and what abilities they are granted on a given network. These challenges move the concerns of access control into more nuanced considerations about the kind of content that users within computer systems may be able to submit. This session considers how redefining cybersecurity might help address such issues more effectively. Learn more about the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at cyber.harvard.edu

What’s the Covid State of Play? Joseph Allen, professor and head of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, joins Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss the issues of ventilation and airborne transmission of the virus, the unique challenges and risks posed by school reopenings, and possible solutions.

What’s the Covid State of Play? Join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, as they try to untangle the challenges in the fight against COVID-19 in a chat with former NSC pandemic policy staffer Beth Cameron and Chief of Strategy and Policy for Partners in Health's MA COVID-19 Response KJ Seung. Zittrain, Bourdeaux, and Cameron recently published a call to U.S. governors for a coordinated response to the pandemic, sounding the alarm on testing paralysis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/op...

The pandemic is a portal, the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote in an essay for the Financial Times. “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” In many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has resurfaced and amplified the worst in the world: intensification of surveillance, racism, nationalism, anti-scientism, bigotry. But something strange has happened as well. Changes, ideas and solutions that were previously deemed impossible have suddenly become possible. Many of these changes still don’t go far enough, come with caveats and fine print, are subject to absurd means-testing, or are only temporary. These aren’t necessarily the changes we want, but they give us a glimpse of what has suddenly become possible. A number of projects are seeking to capture and document the new possi

Low-income countries have several systemic disadvantages that cumulatively inhibit their capacity to cope with the spread of COVID-19. These systemic disadvantages, a result of long-term poverty and resource-constrained healthcare systems, are further worsened by other socio-economic outcomes of lockdowns and the spread of infection. BKC hosted a seminar on the economic and healthcare fallouts of COVID-19 in low-income countries, with a specific focus on groups such as women, refugees, and informal laborers, alongside options for international collaboration. BKC’s Padmashree Gehl Sampath sets the stage and moderates the discussions, joined by BKC’s Yvonne Macpherson, who shares her work on COVID-19’s impact on women and refugees, and Dr. Madani B. Thiam, Chief of Health and Nutrition, UNICEF Myanmar, who speaks on the impact of COVID-19 on health systems capacity and healthcare from his experience in the field.

Ever since Florida 2000, it seems the US cannot hold an election without horror stories about equipment failing, votes lost, and disenfranchised voters says Ben Adida, co-founder and Executive Director of VotingWorks. "Why does a country as powerful and resourceful as the United States have so much trouble running an election?" is a central question to this virtual event. In "Building Better Voting Systems," Adida discusses why running an election in the US is particularly challenging. He focuses on voting equipment; it's conventional wisdom that voting machines are universally terrible, and Adida argues that we need to understand how we got here. But it doesn't have to be that way: Adida explains how the US can do much better, and specifically what VotingWorks is working on. Finally, Adida covers how VotingWorks and others are going to help run safe and trustworthy elections in the COVID-19 era.

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) sweeps the world in devastating fashion, scientists are scrambling to develop effective vaccines and treatments. But how should those medicines be priced globally? Following Donald Trump’s “America First” policy with respect to vaccine and drug pricing would be tragic, argue Quentin Palfrey and John Stubbs. Instead, Palfrey and Stubbs propose a pharmaceutical pricing policy modeled on progressive taxation to distribute costs equitably worldwide. This discussion was moderated by Ashveena Gajeelee.

Governments and publics are increasingly asking that tech companies work to address the challenges and adapt to the changes technology has unleashed, from digital security to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the core of these new expectations is the sense that world-changing technologies must be governed in accordance with a broad ethic of responsibility – to individual users and to society at large. In this conversation, Jonathan Zittrain was joined by Microsoft President Brad Smith to discuss how big tech might rise to these new challenges and opportunities.

As people turn to news outlets for information, journalists -- and data journalists in particular -- are under pressure to make sense of droves of complicated information. Data Overload discusses the challenges journalists face obtaining, analyzing, and explaining data about the current pandemic. Todd Wallack, a Berkman Klein-Nieman Fellow and data journalist at the Boston Globe, is joined by Caroline Chen, who covers health care for ProPublica, and Armand Emamdjomeh, an assignment editor, graphics at the Washington Post. This event was co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation.

Fairness and discrimination in algorithmic systems are globally recognized as topics of critical importance. To date, the majority of work in this area starts from an American regulatory perspective defined by the notions of ‘disparate treatment’ and ‘disparate impact.’ But European legal notions of discrimination are not equivalent. In this talk, Sandra Wachter, Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, robotics and Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford, examines EU law and jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice concerning non-discrimination and identifies a critical incompatibility between European notions of discrimination and existing work on algorithmic and automated fairness. Wachter discusses the evidential requirements for bringing a claim under EU non-discrimination law and propose a statistical test as a baseline to identify and assess potential cases of a

The identification of bots is an important and complicated task. The bot classifier Botometer was successfully introduced as a way to estimate the number of bots in a given list of accounts and has been frequently used in academic publications. Given its relevance for academic research, and our understanding of the presence of automated accounts in any given Twitter discourse, Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser studied Botometer's diagnostic ability over time. To do so, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser collected the Botometer scores for five datasets in two languages (English/German) over three months. For this virtual event, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser discussed their findings and answered questions about the implications of their research.

This virtual talk features Jessica Fjeld, assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic and lead author on the “Principled AI” report, in conversation with Ryan Budish, an assistant research director at Berkman Klein and a member of OECD’s AI Governance Expert Group, which proposed high-level AI principles. Fjeld and Budish discuss AI principles both generally (the high-level landscape in which they exist) and in practice (the creation and implementation process for principles.)

“In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, we should approach data sets with an awareness that they are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them,” says Yanni Alexander Loukissas, Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. All data are local. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of sources important for understanding public data in the United States—Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—this talk explains how to analyze data settings rather than data sets. This talk sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorit