On January 31, 2024, the US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on child safety online. Prior to the hearing, Integrity Institute released a list of recommendations on how platforms could better protect child safety online. Following the hearing, Institute staff share their takeaways in this post mortem. Image credit: US Senate Judiciary Committee Website

Here are some red herrings you might notice companies and policymakers raise on January 31, and what they should be addressing instead.

The influence of AI on the global election cycle is undeniable. While generative AI isn’t the sole determinant of election outcomes, its potential for misuse by nefarious entities cannot be ignored.

Integrity Institute delineates the best practices we advocate for Child Safety across all digital platforms.

This is what draws me most to integrity work: its focus is on protecting people not just after harm has occurred, but also by building systems and policies aimed to prevent it in the first place and address its root causes.

This is the first of what we hope will be many conversations with Integrity Institute members and friends that aim to demystify some of the integrity topics that are most often cited as confusing or frustrating. Our goal here is “real talk” about issues that we frequently see misunderstood, dramatized, or which just haven’t been discussed in a useful way for someone who hasn’t worked on integrity issues day in and day out.

Reactive measures to address biased AI features and the spread of misinformation on social media platforms are not enough, says Nadah Feteih, an Employee Fellow with the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at the Berkman Klein Center and a Tech Policy Fellow with the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

By Numa Dhamani and Maggie Engler

Content moderation was already an extremely difficult and thankless job, and with generative AI potentially increasing the quantity, quality, and personalization of adversarial content, is it borderline impossible for social media platforms to moderate content now? 

Disinformation campaigns aren’t new. In fact, before the era of social media, yellow journalism swayed citizen opinions on wars, politics, and the economic states of various nations. Disinformation campaigns led to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s and, post 9/11, to the unjust targeting of Sikhs and Muslims due to mistaken associations between Al-Qaeda and all Muslims. These campaigns have been present in every major election…

By Theodora Skeadas and Hallie Stern

During the 2019 Indian general elections, researchers studied how organizers used a network of WhatsApp groups to manipulate Twitter trends through coordinated mass postings. The researchers joined 600 WhatsApp groups and found evidence of 75 hashtag manipulation campaigns in the form of mobilization messages with lists of pre-written tweets. During the election period, these campaigns produced hundreds of nationwide Twitter trends with the goal of influencing outcomes…

Integrity Institute members Eric Davis, Diane Chang, Lucia Gamboa, Amari Cowan, Swapneel Mehta, Nichole Sessego, and David Evan Harris submitted comments to the FEC in October 2023, requesting it to address the anticipated onslaught of deepfakes in 2024 US campaign advertising.

Integrity Institute visiting fellows Rebecca Thein, Theodora Skeadas, and Sarah Amos share their reflections from attending 2023 DEF CON alongside Institute members.

Integrity Institute visiting fellow Theodora Skeadas co-authored this piece that first appeared in Tech Policy Press.

Following the first published research from the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES), Institute fellow Tom Cunningham shows that social media has probably not made a huge contribution to US polarization and how we can extrapolate estimates from the FIES to other effects of interest, specifically the aggregate impact of social media on the US over the last 20 years.