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 Online Education 2020-2021 at Harvard Law School where she also teaches a course on Youth, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship. She is formerly the Associate Dean for Administration, Associate Professor of Legal Skills, and Director of Academic Success at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

This book talk was co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

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 transmission of COVID-19 — these are occasions where one or a few persons infect a disproportionate number of other individuals due to a combination of environmental factors, timing, and the activities people are engaged in. As pioneered by Japanese scientists and officials, retrospective tracing identifies those events and allows tracers to discover more cases, more efficiently.

Participants

Dr. Hitoshi Oshitani, a member of Japan’s Subcommittee on Novel Coronavirus Disease Control whose pioneering work helped develop the retrospective tracing methodology, presents on the retrospective tracing methodology, how it was developed, and how it has been implemented in Japan.

Dr. KJ Seung, chief of strategy and policy for Partners in Health’s MA COVID-19 Response, Associate Physician at the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School presents on how the state of Massachusetts is implementing retrospective tracing methodologies.

Professor Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist at the University of North Carolina who writes publicly on pandemic response for outlets including The Atlantic and is a member of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, joins Drs. Seung, Oshitani, and Bourdeaux for a question and answer panel focused on implementation of this methodology.

Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, Research Director of the Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change and co-lead of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Policy Practice, introduces and moderates the session.

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 disinformation campaigns.

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...