Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Page 1 of 6)

The True Costs of Misinformation
Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

presented by Joan Donovan

Of course we’re avid, avid watch­ers of Tucker Carlson. But inso­far as he’s like the shit fil­ter, which is that if things make it as far as Tucker Carlson, then they prob­a­bly have much more like…stuff that we can look at online. And so some­times he’ll start talk­ing about some­thing and we don’t real­ly under­stand where it came from and then when we go back online we can find that there’s quite a bit of dis­course about would­n’t it be fun­ny if peo­ple believed this about antifa.”

The Breakdown: Joan Donovan on Domestic Misinformation

presented by Joan Donovan, Oumou Ly

We are immersed in a hyper­par­ti­san media ecosys­tem where the future of jour­nal­ism is at stake, the future of social media is at stake. And right now I’m real­ly wor­ried that the US democ­ra­cy might not sur­vive this moment.

The Breakdown: Foreign inter­fer­ence and the US 2020 Election

presented by Naima Green-Riley, Oumou Ly

Not all dis- and mis­in­for­ma­tion is for­eign, so that’s why this is such a large prob­lem because there are many domes­tic actors that engage in dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns as well. So, the nar­ra­tives that we’ve seen across the space come from so many dif­fer­ent peo­ple that some­times it can be hard to tar­get the the prob­lem to one par­tic­u­lar actor or one par­tic­u­lar motive. 

Two Geniuses Walk into a Zoom

presented by Joan Donovan, Mary L Gray, Tressie McMillan Cottom

I want you to know that they are just path­mak­ers and ‑break­ers in their field. There’s a way in which you’re taught to be a schol­ar and you’re taught to be prag­mat­ic in the choice of your projects, you’re taught to be care­ful in the ways in which you speak in pub­lic, and these two do it bet­ter than any­one I know.

A Pessimist’s Guide to the Future of Technology

presented by Ian Bogost

In this moment that we’re in today with tech­nol­o­gy, where we’re I think shift­ing final­ly into a mode where it’s pos­si­ble to be crit­i­cal with­out get­ting sneered at, if we kind of look back at the…I don’t know, the opti­mistic aspi­ra­tional­ism that we’ve been using to encounter tech­nol­o­gy in the broad­est sense, and we look back on those moments of the recent past or even the dis­tant past, we can see how we knew how things were going to turn out, actu­al­ly. We just weren’t pay­ing them heed.

The Breakdown: Daphne Keller Explains the Communications Decency Act

presented by Daphne Keller, Oumou Ly

The key thing that Congress realized…was that if you want plat­forms to mod­er­ate, you need to give them both of those immu­ni­ties. You can’t just say, You’re free to mod­er­ate, go do it,” you have to also say, And, if you under­take to mod­er­ate but you miss some­thing and there’s you know, defama­tion still on the plat­form or what­ev­er, the fact that you tried to mod­er­ate won’t be held against you.” 

The Breakdown: Jonathan Zittrain Reflects on 20192020 Assembly Program, Disinformation

presented by Jonathan Zittrain, Oumou Ly

What would it mean to have peo­ple who weren’t just aca­d­e­mics in an envi­ron­ment true to the high­est ideals of acad­e­mia? Of solv­ing prob­lems, of exam­in­ing ques­tions and our own assump­tions about answers to those questions? 

The Breakdown: Brian Scully on Government Response to Disinformation

presented by Brian Scully, Oumou Ly

We’re focused on what we call coun­ter­ing for­eign influ­ence but real­ly what we’re try­ing to do is build nation­al resilience to for­eign influ­ence activ­i­ties. And so for us a lot of what we do is pub­lic edu­ca­tion and pub­lic aware­ness out­reach to dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, pro­vide resources that folks can use to bet­ter under­stand both the risk and then ways to mit­i­gate the risk.

The Ideas of John Perry Barlow in Uncertain Times

presented by Charles Nesson, Jonathan Vincent Pace, Mutale Nkonde

If you’re look­ing to the ques­tion how can the whole thing be reg­u­lat­ed, how can one get con­trol of this whole envi­ron­ment, so as to cre­ate a world in which those orig­i­nal free­doms that Barlow was talk­ing about are shared by every­one, the answer is you can’t do it.

The Breakdown: Claire Wardle on Journalism and Disinformation

presented by Claire Wardle, Oumou Ly

I think those of us who study and think about mis- and dis­in­for­ma­tion, it’s very tempt­ing to study what’s in front of us. And so there’s a dis­pro­por­tion­ate focus on Twitter, because it’s the eas­i­est to study because there’s an open API—although, caveats—and Facebook. That’s a lot of the places that we study. And sim­i­lar­ly, that’s a lot of the places that jour­nal­ists look for con­tent and sources and sto­ries. And so we end up kind of real­ly just think­ing about that as the prob­lem,” when actu­al­ly we need to think about the full ecosystem.

Page 1 of 6