The Social Media Summit @ MIT (SMS@MIT) 2021

• Andrew McAfee – Co-director, MIT IDE
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE
• David C. Schmittlein – Dean and Professor,  MIT Sloan School of Management

• Camille François – Chief Innovation Officer, Graphika, Inc.
• Maria Ressa – CEO, Rappler and a Time Person of the Year 2018
• Ali Velshi – Host, Velshi; Business Correspondent, NBC
• Clint Watts –Distinguish Research Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute

Rescuing truth requires thoughtful discourse on fake news–its genesis, propagation, consequences and solutions. Current events push us towards threats to our democracies, our economies and our public health during the Coronavirus pandemic and beyond. This session will engage some of the world’s top experts on the spread of falsity, conspiracy cults and social media manipulation, both foreign and domestic, to explore real solutions to the abuse of new communication technologies – from cyberwarfare to online harassment and from conspiracy theories to political and economic terrorism.

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• Carole Cadwalladr – Author and Investigative Journalist at The Observer
• Nate Persily – Professor, Stanford Law School
• John Markoff – Affiliate Fellow , Stanford HAI
• Kate Starbird – Professor, University of Washington

A critical step toward any solution to our social media crisis is transparency. To address the dramatic harms social media is creating, we need to understand more deeply how it works. We need platform transparency, algorithmic transparency, and choice. We need meaningful industry-academic partnerships to dig into the inner workings of social media. But, no one will ever forget that the Cambridge Analytica scandal began with Facebook sharing data with an academic institution. How can we thread the needle of this Transparency Paradox–our simultaneous need to make social platforms more open and more secure and private at the same time? What are the right models for achieving transparency safely and securely, and what tradeoffs do we face in designing and executing these models? How can we achieve meaningful oversight and auditing of the inner workings of social media, and is the Facebook Oversight Board a step in the right direction? In this session we’ll discuss how to safely open this black box so we can shine a much needed light under the hood of social media.

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• Nick Clegg — Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications, Facebook
• Sinan Aral — Director, MIT IDE

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• Joshua Gans – Professor, U Toronto
• Marietje Schaake – President, Cyber Peace Institute and International Policy, Director, Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center
• Zephyr Teachout – Assistant Professor, Fordham Law School
• Albert Wenger – Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures

Without competition, social media platforms have little incentive to solve the crises they have wrought. But, what are the best ways to revive competition in a social media economy governed by network effects? How can we address the political influence of the largest social media platforms? In this session, our panelists will bring to bear their perspectives from law, public policy, economics and technology ventures to debate the most popular options, including breaking up big tech, antitrust enforcement, interoperability legislation, data and social network portability, and forward looking merger oversight.

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• Renée Richardson Gosline – Principal Research Scientist, MIT
• Roger McNamee – Founding Partner, Elevation Partners
• Safiya Noble – Associate Professor and Co-Founder of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA
• Eli Pariser – Co-Founder, Upworthy

At the heart of the social media crisis is a problem of thoughtful design. The way social media platforms–and the algorithms that run them–are designed has an outsized impact on the outcomes we see in society: from their perpetuation of bias, to their algorithmic amplification of hateful and harmful speech, to their role in polarizing our society. In this session, we’ll tackle the critical question of how we must humanize social media’s design. How can the social platforms and their algorithms achieve the promise of social media while avoiding its peril? Should social platforms be held responsible for the safety of their products, like most other industries? What changes are necessary to reduce the algorithmic amplification of harm and hate, and to increase the spread of opportunity, health, and meaningful human connection?

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• Rana el Kaliouby – CEO Affectiva
• Scott Galloway – Professor, NYU Stern School
• Guy Kawasaki – Chief Evangelist, Canva and Host, Remarkable People Podcast
• Hilary Mason – Co-Founder, Hidden Door; Founder, Fast Forward Labs

The social media business model–built on top of the attention economy–is unbelievably effective. But, is it good for us? Does the attention economy inevitably lead to the spread of the least common denominators like falsity, hate and polarization? Or can it be adjusted to align shareholder value with society’s values? How did we pick popularity as the human yardstick and can we re-engineer the social media economy toward more productive goals? Would a subscription model point us toward the promise of social media and away from its peril or would subscription services simply exacerbate inequality? Are there alternatives to short term engagement as the metric running the social economy? How can we prioritize authenticity and value and align them with long run shareholder value in the social economy?

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• Renée DiResta – Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
• Yaël Eisenstat – Future of Democracy Fellow, the Berggruen Institute, and Researcher-in-Residence, Betalab
• Jeff Kosseff – Assistant Professor, US Naval Academy 
• Rick Stengel – Former Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs and Diplomacy, and Former Managing Editor, TIME Magazine

The First Amendment right to free speech in the US is a cornerstone of our democracy and the marketplace of ideas that spurs innovation. But, one cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theatre and most would agree that incitements to violence represent speech that should be moderated. But how do we draw the lines between free and harmful speech in the age of social media? And who should draw those lines? Should we repeal or reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and what effect would that have on speech? How can we curtail the livestreaming of mass murders like the one in Christchurch, New Zealand without inadvertently quelling or chilling speech? This session will go beyond the lament of the negative, and hopefully lead us to a discourse on the directions law and policy can take to restore speech while minimizing its harmful effects.

• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

Event Concludes

Sinan Aral a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a Founding Partner at Manifest Capital. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline, and his TED talk on “Protecting Truth in the Age of Misinformation,” which received over two million views in nine months, set the stage for today’s modern solutions to the misinformation crisis. Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winnerand among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic. Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard. You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Andrew McAfee is the Co-Director of the IDE and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

His research investigates how information technology changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also focuses on how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce. In addition to having numerous papers published, McAfee also writes a widely read blog, which is at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 articles, case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. Prior to joining MIT Sloan, McAfee was a professor at Harvard Business School. He has also served as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. McAfee received his doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT. He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences, and has taught in executive education programs around the world.

Carole Cadwalladr is a journalist for the Guardian and Observer in the United Kingdom. She worked for a year with whistleblower Christopher Wylie to publish her investigation into Cambridge Analytica, which she shared with the New York Times. The investigation resulted in Mark Zuckerberg being called before Congress and Facebook losing more than $100 billion from its share price. She has also uncovered multiple crimes committed during the European referendum and evidence of Russian interference in Brexit.

Cadwalladr’s work has won a Polk Award and the Orwell Prize for political journalism, and she was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting in 2019.

Sir Nick Clegg joined Facebook in October 2018 as Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications after almost two decades in British and European public life. Prior to being elected to the UK Parliament in 2005 he worked in the European Commission and served for five years as a Member of the European Parliament. He became leader of the Liberal Democrat party in 2007 and served as Deputy Prime Minister in the UK’s first Coalition Government since the war from 2010 to 2015.He has written two best-selling books: Politics: Between the Extremes and How To Stop Brexit (and make Britain great again). Nick currently lives in California with his wife, Miriam, and three sons.

Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social and other media networks. Renee’s areas of research include disinformation and propaganda by state-sponsored actors, and health misinformation and conspiracy theories. Renee has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.

Renée regularly writes and speaks about the role that tech platforms and curatorial algorithms play in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more. She is a 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow, a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member. Renée is a co-author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by O’Reilly Media.

Yaël Eisenstat is a Future of Democracy Fellow at the Berggruen Institute and a Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab, an early-stage investment program catalyzing startup activity around “Fixing The Internet”. In 2018, she was Facebook’s Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political ads. Previously, she spent 18 years working around the globe as a CIA officer, a national security advisor to Vice President Biden, a diplomat, and the head of a global political risk firm.

A pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI), Rana el Kaliouby, PhD, is co-founder and CEO of MIT spinoff and category-defining company Affectiva, and is the author of Girl Decoded. Rana led the innovation of the company’s award-winning technology, which uses deep learning and massive amounts of data to analyze complex and nuanced emotions and cognitive states from face and voice. She has raised over $50 million in venture and strategic funding for Affectiva, where the company’s technology is used by automotive OEMs and tier 1 suppliers to improve road safety and the in-cabin experience, in addition to 25% of the Fortune Global 500 companies to test content, and in other industries like mental health. Rana is now paving the way for Human Perception AI: software that can detect all things human, from nuanced human emotions and complex cognitive states, to behaviors, activities and the objects people use.

Prior to founding Affectiva, Rana was a research scientist at MIT Media Lab where she spearheaded the applications of emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism research. Rana holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo, a PhD from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Post Doctorate at MIT.

Rana is one of few women leading a disruptive AI company. A Muslim-American and passionate advocate, she frequently speaks in press and on stage about innovation, women in technology, ethics in AI, diversity and leadership. Rana has been recognized on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list, Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech, Inc.’s Female Founders 100 list, and named one of the three Global Business pioneers by Bloomberg in 2017. Rana is a trustee at the American University in Cairo and a senior advisor to the Technology and Public Purpose project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Rana is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, a Young Presidents’ Organization member, and a part of the Partnership on AI, alongside founding companies Amazon, Apple, Google/DeepMind and others.

Camille François works on the impacts of technology on society, with an emphasis on cyber conflict and information operations. She currently serves as the Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika where she oversees its investigation, analyses and R&D teams and leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment. She was previously a Principal Researcher at Google, in the “Jigsaw” team, an innovation unit that builds technology to address global security challenges and protect vulnerable users. Camille has advised governments and parliamentary committees on both sides of the Atlantic, investigated Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election on behalf of the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and served as a special advisor to the Chief Technology Officer of France. She is an affiliate scholar of the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, a Fulbright scholar and a Mozilla Fellow. She holds a masters degree in human rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a masters degree in international security from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Camille was distinguished by the MIT Tech Review in the prestigious “35 Innovators Under 35” annual award in the “Visionary” category for her work leveraging data science to detect and analyze deceptive campaigns at scale. She was also distinguished by TIME magazine as one of the 100 next most influential people in the world, for her work protecting open societies from the threat of disinformation.

Scott Galloway is Professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur. In 2012, he was named one of the world’s best business professors by Poets & Quants. He has founded nine companies, including Prophet, Red Envelope, L2, and Section4. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, and most recently, Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. He has served on the boards of directors of The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. His Prof G and Pivot podcasts, No Mercy / No Malice blog, and Prof G YouTube channel reach millions. In 2020, Adweek named Pivot Business Podcast of the Year. 

Joshua Gans is a Professor of Strategic Management and holder of the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (with a cross appointment in the Department of Economics). Joshua is also Chief Economist of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab. Prior to 2011, he was the foundation Professor of Management (Information Economics) at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne and prior to that he was at the School of Economics, University of New South Wales. In 2011, Joshua was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research (New England). Joshua holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an honors degree in economics from the University of Queensland. In 2012, Joshua was appointed as a Research Associate of the NBER in the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program.

Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the head of the new Human-AI Interaction group at MIT’s Initiative on The Digital Economy. She is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications of AI for cognitive bias in human decision-making. In 2020 Dr. Gosline was named a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. and an honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe.” She has also been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. She is a leading thinker on the science of digital brand strategy and CX, and has been published in academic journal and books, and has contributed her expertise to international media outlets PBS, The BBC, The Economist, NPR, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, and Psychology Today.

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and the creator of Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People podcast. He is an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) and an adjunct professor of the University of New South Wales. He was the chief evangelist of Apple and a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. He has written Wise Guy, The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and eleven other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University, an MBA from UCLA, and an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Jeff Kosseff is an assistant professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy’s Cyber Science Department. His latest book, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, a history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, was published in Spring 2019 by Cornell University Press. He also is the author of Cybersecurity Law, a textbook and treatise published by Wiley in 2017, with a second edition released in November 2019.   Jeff practiced cybersecurity, privacy, and First Amendment law at Covington & Burling, and clerked for Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Before becoming a lawyer, he was a technology and political journalist for The Oregonian and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and recipient of the George Polk Award for national reporting.   He received a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and a B.A. and M.P.P. from the University of Michigan.

John Markoff is an affiliate fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. He is currently researching a biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Previously he was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences in 2017-18.  He has also been a staff historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Until 2017 he was a reporter at the The New York Times, beginning in March 1988 as the paper’s national computer writer. Prior to joining the Times, he worked for The San Francisco Examiner.

He has written about technology for The Pacific News Service, he was a reporter at Infoworld and West Coast editor for Byte Magazine and wrote a column on personal computers for The San Jose Mercury. He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism and an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism.

In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting as part of a New York Times project on labor and automation. In 2007, he was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization’s highest honor. In June of 2010 the New York Times presented him with the Nathaniel Nash Award, which is given annually for foreign and business reporting.

He is the co-author of  The High Cost of High Tech, published by Harper & Row.  He co-wroteCyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, published Simon & Schuster.  Hyperion published Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw, which he co-authored with Tsutomu Shimomura.  What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry, was published by Viking Books. Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, was published by HarperCollins Ecco.

Markoff grew up in Palo Alto, California and graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington.  He attended graduate school at the University of Oregon and received a masters degree in sociology.

Hilary is Co-Founder and CEO of Hidden Door, building AI-enabled social storytelling games. Previously, she was Founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research and product company, which was acquired by Cloudera in 2017. She subsequently led Cloudera’s Data Science business as General Manager. Hilary was the Data Scientist in Residence for Accel Partners, former Chief Scientist for a social media company, co-founder of HackNY, and a member of NYC Resistor, a hacker collective.

Roger McNamee is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, which documents his journey from mentor to Mark Zuckerberg to critic of Facebook.  Zucked was the cover story in TIME on January 28, 2019.  Since April 2017, Roger has been engaged – with many others – in a campaign to address the dark side of social media and reform the tech industry.

Roger began his career in 1982 at T. Rowe Price Associates, where he managed the top performing Science & Technology Fund and co-managed the New Horizons Fund. In 1991, he launched Integral Capital Partners, the first crossover fund (combining later stage venture capital with public market investments), in partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Morgan Stanley & Co.  In 1999, Roger co-founded Silver Lake Partners, the first private equity fund focused on technology businesses. In 2004, Roger and his partners launched Elevation Partners, an investment partnership focused on the intersection of media and technology.  U2’s Bono was a co-founder of Elevation.

Roger has written opinion pieces for the  New York Times, Washington Post, TIME magazine, Wired, the Financial Times, The Guardian, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and San Diego Union-Tribune. He is a frequent guest on “Squawk Alley” on CNBC and on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC.  Roger was featured in three documentaries: Frontline: The Facebook Dilemma, The Great Hack, and The Social Dilemma. He was a technical advisor to HBO’s Silicon Valley for seasons 2 through 6.

Roger holds a B. A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. for the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Links:

TIME magazine cover story about Zucked:

https://time.com/magazine/us/5505429/january-28th-2019-vol-193-no-3-u-s/

New Yorker profile:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/02/big-techs-big-defector

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Information Studies where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She also holds appointments in African American Studies and Gender Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and has been appointed as a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). She is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. and serves on the NYU Center Critical Race and Digital Studies advisory board. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications.

Dr. Noble is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is regularly quoted for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of local news and podcasts. Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies, as featured in Noema magazine.

Safiya is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, and holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was recently awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018. Recently, she was named in the “Top 25  Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers of 2019” by Government Technologymagazine.

In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA), and is also the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Award winner from the Illinois Alumni Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Eli Pariser wants to help technology and media serve democracy.

 At 23 years old, he was named Executive Director of MoveOn.org, where he led the organization’s opposition to the Iraq war, raised over $120 million from small donors, and helped pioneer the practice of online citizen engagement. In 2006 he confounded Avaaz, now the world’s largest citizen’s organization with over 40 million members in 190 countries.

In 2011, Pariser anticipated the dangers of a hyper-personalized Internet, and introduced the “filter bubble” to the lexicon in his New York Times bestselling book of the same name. Bill Gates, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and other internet luminaries have since expressed concern about the phenomenon, and his TED talk on the topic now has over 4 million views. In 2012, he co-founded Upworthy, a mission-driven media company designed to make civically important ideas popular, with Peter Koechley. Within two years, Upworthy had over 80 million monthly visitors.

Pariser’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and WIRED; he has appeared on World News Tonight, Good Morning America, the Colbert Report, and many other shows; and he speaks internationally about democracy, media and the Internet—including once in an Austrian horse stable with the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. He has a BA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock and an honorary doctorate from Dominican University, and sits on the US Programs Board of the Open Society Foundation and the Information and Democracy Commission. He is currently co-director of the Civic Signals project at the National Conference on Citizenship.

He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, filmmaker Gena Konstantinakos, and their two kids.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

A journalist in Asia for 35 years, Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s executive editor and CEO, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail nine times to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

For her courage and work on disinformation and ‘fake news,’ Maria was named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. In 2020, she received the Journalist of the Year award, the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the Most Resilient Journalist Award, the Tucholsky Prize, the Truth to Power Award, and the Four Freedoms Award.

Among many awards for her principled stance, she received the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, the Knight International Journalism Award from the International Center for Journalists, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University, the Columbia Journalism Award, the Free Media Pioneer Award from the International Press Institute, and the Sergei Magnitsky Award for Investigative Journalism.

Before founding Rappler, Maria focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before opening the network’s Jakarta Bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. She wrote Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism.

Marietje Schaake is the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She was named President of the Cyber Peace Institute.

Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs and technology policies. Marietje is affiliated with a number of non-profits including the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Observer Research Foundation in India and writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and a bi-monthly column for the Dutch NRC newspaper.

Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate’s research sits in the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how social media and other communication technologies are used during crisis events. Currently, her work focuses on the production and spread of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation in the crisis context. Starbird is a co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public.

Richard Stengel is the longest serving Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in American history (2013-16). While at the State Department, he helped modernize State’s communications and led the department’s counter-disinformation efforts. He helped create and oversee the Global Engagement Center, the United States’ only stand-alone anti-ISIL messaging entity. He spearheaded the creation of the Sawab Center in Abu Dhabi, the first joint American and foreign counter ISIL messaging hub, which has become a template for others around the world.

He also led department-wide efforts to counter the global rise of disinformation. In addition, the Under Secretary oversees all communications from the podium and beyond. He also oversaw the modernization of all embassies websites and pioneered the use of social media at the Department. He also led the creation of English for All, a government-wide effort to promote the teaching of English around the world and oversaw the departments extensive educational exchanges, including the Fulbright Scholarship.

Zephyr Teachout is a Law Professor at Fordham, the author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff-box to Citizens United (2014) and Break ’em Up: Recovering our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money (2020) as well as dozens of Law Review Articles. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, New Republic, Nation, Prospect, and dozens of other publications. She is a Board Member of CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), and The Nation, and is an advisory Board member of the American Economic Liberties Project and the Open Markets Institute. She has also been a candidate for office, including most recently New York Attorney General.

Clint Watts is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and

Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. Watts recently examined the rise of social media’s influence in his first book, Messing with The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News.

Watts’ research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, the influence of social media, and Russian disinformation. His tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. From that year until 2016, he worked with a team to track and model the rise of Russian influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. Presidential election. This research led him to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West. Today, Clint leads a team called Miburo that detects, disrupts and counters extremism and malign influence around the world.

Watts has served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, an FBI Special Agent, the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and an analyst supporting the U.S. intelligence community. His writing has appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War on The Rocks, and the Huffington Post.

Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT.