The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

By YVoteNewsNews Commentary
Download on the App Store

The Round Table: A YVote Podcast episodes

  • How tech can extend & amplify the work of The White House
    Our guest Macon Phillips shared that while never studied or planned to work on government, he found himself working on the tech team for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and ultimately going to the White House with him to try to translate the tools that had been so successful in the campaign into effective governance.
    Macon noted that they thought about their work in three different areas when they entered in 2009:
    1. How to amplify the president’s message
    2. How to make the work of the White House—which can be very complicated!— more accessible to people
    3. How to use technology to give people meaningful ways to participate in government
    1 min
  • The Sum of Our Parts

    At this week's Round Table, s part of our series on creating healthy discourse online, Divya, Inica, and Madeline spoke with Macon Phillips, founder of Starling Strategies. Macon headed President Obama’s White House’s digital strategy during Obama’s first term after playing a central role in the 2008 presidential campaign’s pioneering use of new media and technology to mobilize supporters. Much of what he learned and applied there informs his worldview and the work he’s doing today, including starting a podcast of his own called “Talk About Power.” And talk about power we did! Macon talked us through the evolutions he’s seen in tech over the last dozen years and their implications. He shared the projects he’s proudest of having worked on in the White House and State Department, and even shared Obama’s “secret sauce” in using tech and social media. Macon named his firm after starlings because of the way the birds flock together in powerful formation, creating something greater than the sum of our parts—like democracy itself. Thank you for joining us!

    27 min
  • The importance of keeping space safe for dissent
    Cathy underscored the importance of keeping safe space for dissent, and for representation by lots of different voices. Members of the Swedish counter-speech group I Am Here talk about how when they used to go online, they felt like all the comments they would see were toxic. It made them feel like, “is this my country? Am I the only one who feels this way?” because they didn’t see their viewpoints represented online, until they found their counterspeech movement and came to feel like they belong.
    The real danger is allowing hateful voices online to feel so powerful and intimidating that people don’t talk back and call out what’s not right. Commenting is important for people who will come upon it later and see the push back.
    1 min
  • What makes counter speech work
    How do we keep collective action from turning into countering hate speech with hate speech? There’s an international group, hubbed in Sweden, called I Am Here. They have very firm rules about how to engage in counter speech. They require members to not espouse hate speech, not spread rumors, and to not even correct someone’s grammar (I mean, we all know that can get pretty heated!) They try to set an example of the discourse norms they want to see online. Not all counter speech efforts are as tightly coordinated nor have as much solidarity as this one does. Many collective efforts emerge more organically in a moment.
    1 min
  • How can we collectively combat hate speech
    In an era dominated by social media and its unique ability to provide a voice for all perspectives and ideologies, platforms and their users have a responsibility to promote an environment characterized by free speech in a ‘controlled’ environment.
    In this week’s podcast with Cathy Buerger of the Dangerous Speech Project she depicted that it is increasingly difficult for the government to step in and ‘regulate’ social media interactions with speech laws without overstepping its boundaries as other foreign nations have done recently. In a country essentially founded on the significance of free speech and expression, we must remember that there’s a distinction to be had between encouraging productive and healthy dialogue and disagreement and strictly controlling and operating what is said across all levels of online interaction, not to mention fostering transparency and consistency in regulation.
    1 min
  • It’s REALLY hard to define hate speech
    Hate speech has many different definitions in different contexts, which is part of why The Dangerous Speech project has chosen a slightly different term. Countries that have laws against incitement don’t necessarily define hate speech in the same way that social media companies do.
    Our guest Cathy Buerger underscored that one person’s free speech can be another person’s hate speech, and one person’s joke can do devastating damage to another person. This makes it difficult to regulate, and makes it difficult for activists to push for regulation, because who do we trust to decide what we can or can’t say? They say if there’s been a government that you don’t trust anytime over the last 50 years, you shouldn’t push for regulation
    1 min
  • Yes, you’re racist
    Our guest Cathy Buerger told us about the genesis of the twitter handle, “Yes, you’re racist”--a great example of counter speech. It was started by Logan Smith after searching for posts that started with “I’m not racist but” which, inevitably, WERE followed by something very racist. So he started retweeting such posts under the “Yes, you’re racist” handle. And the account now has 350K followers.
    Smith’s goal is not to change the minds of the original posters--he’s pretty aware the public shaming isn’t a way to change people’s beliefs. But it IS a good way to raise awareness that this racism and these attitudes exist online.
    1 min
  • The Anthropology of Online Communities
    On this week’s podcast, we had the pleasure of being joined by Cathy Buerger of the Dangerous Speech Project (DSP.) The DSP studies the relationship between speech and intercommunity violence and, most importantly, different effective methods to respond to hateful speech to diminish harmful impacts.
    Cathy is an anthropologist by training, with a specialty in studying how communities come together to improve spaces and shift norms in a positive direction through protest and advocacy. Her doctoral research focused on human rights defenders in Ghana who were trying to shift norms to create healthier communities. There are parallels in her work at DSP studying groups of people who are trying to change things to make online communities healthier and safer.
    1 min
  • Countering Dangerous Speech

    At this week's Round Table, Divya, Isaiah, Olivia, and Madeline continued our series on creating healthy discourse online in conversation with Cathy Buerger, Director of Research at the Dangerous Speech Project at American University. Today, many fear that free speech can go too far and feel it should be regulated in some way--but who do we trust to make decisions about what we can say and not say to prevent hate speech? Dangerous speech is a more specific term than hate speech, defined as speech that can inspire violence. DSP works to find ways to counter dangerous speech without constraining free speech--which we found SUPER interesting and empowering, as we are proponents of ensuring that discourse allows for dissent and representation of different views. 

    Over the past few years, Cathy has been investigating user-led counter speech efforts from around the world.  She’s interviewed over 50 individuals globally, and recently completed a digital ethnography of one of the largest groups of counter-speakers, which has over 74,000 members currently working to improve online discourse in Sweden. As an anthropologist by training, Cathy brings valuable lenses to this work and ones we greatly benefitted from in this conversation with her. Thank you for joining us!

    32 min
  • Creating a More Civically-Connected Citizenry

    At this week's Round Table, Eliza, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline and Olivia spoke with Ben Gordon of CitizenLab, a digital democracy platform that facilitates communication and co-creation between cities and their communities. Residents can post, discuss, and upvote their own ideas or choose to vote, prioritize, and fund projects and programs that their city is considering. Over 200+ cities around the world use CitizenLab to engage, consult, and deliberate with their residents and manage their ideas - both asynchronously and live through their online workshops feature. This helps cities become both more responsive and more efficient in their engagement efforts. This is, of course, all the more important since we’re all stuck at home. Ben notes that social platforms initially had no norms, so a lot of bad behaviors evolved. Conversely, CitizenLab creates vibrantly democratic online spaces for governments to engage and learn from their communities, and for residents to discuss and deliberate with one another about the local issues that matter to them. CitizenLab is working to create an expectation of two-way communication and a culture of continuous engagement between constituents and elected officials.  We’re VERY excited about this proposition and hope you will be too. Thank you for joining us!

    25 min

About The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

From the publisher's feed

The Round Table provides a platform for conversation and engagement of civically-minded young people from different parts of the country. We strive to model civil dialogue across various divides--socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, political, and regional. We aim to challenge norms and represent all kinds of diversity--especially of perspective and ideas--enabling listeners to “hear” our thinking.