Media, January 6th, and Democracy
Don’t miss out on “Media and January 6th” on April 12th! Plus: how should we understand the role of modern celebrity in politics? And an affiliate publication highlight.
Media and January 6
In just a week and a half, CITAP is convening 13 contributors and all 4 co-editors of “Media and January 6th” for a full day of panels discussing the 2021 attempted coup and exploring crucial avenues for safeguarding democracy.
You can attend the event in-person or via webinar. Check out the details for the day below:
10:00am-11:30am | Panel: Understanding January 6th
with Shannon McGregor, Scott Althaus, Danielle Brown, Alice Marwick, and Francesca Tripodi
11:30am-1:00pm | Lunch
1:00pm-2:30pm | Panel: Researching Threats to Democracy
with Rebekah Tromble, Yunkang Yang, Regina Lawrence, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Dave Karpf
2:30pm-3:00pm | Coffee Break
3:00pm-4:30pm | Panel: Defending Democracy
with Khadijah Costley White, Andrew Thompson, Meredith Clark, Silvio Waisbord, and Paul E. Johnson
4:30pm-5:30pm | Coffee Break
5:30pm-7:00pm | Closing Conversation: Media, January 6th, and American History
with Daniel Kreiss, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Dannagal Young
Publications and appearances
Tressie McMillan Cottom joined the NYT podcast "Matter of Opinion" to discuss the intersection of celebrity and politics, raising questions about the potential influence of figures like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift amidst today’s political landscape. Tressie states, “If you are a politician right now, and you are at all aware of the fact that angry, scared women are shifting the political needle, you might be thinking that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are uniquely-suited celebrity endorsements.” The conversation also delved into the risks for micro and uber celebrities in endorsing political candidates, with Taylor Swift's advocacy for voter registration serving as a pertinent example. They discuss the nature of celebrity in politics, as well, and how it’s different for the Left and the Right. One of the hosts, Ross Douthat, discusses how celebrity is coded as liberal in our culture, so Republicans are more easily starstruck and engaged with celebrities in politics, with Tressie adding “they are much more inclined to accept kind of whatever celebrity they can get.”
Tressie also wrote a NYT piece, “Who Would Want to Go to a College Like This?” (gift link), noting the discrepancy in the “big” stories about college and the real stories that are happening day to day. The “big stories” (DEI, liberal “woke” education) don’t cover or touch on the real concerns that college students have (gun violence, “anti-woke” laws, and reproductive healthcare). Tressie, analyzing these discrepancies, notes, “It is remarkable, given these data points, how little politicians and the public are talking about how afraid college students are — not of new ideas but of being shot on campus.”
It is remarkable, given these data points, how little politicians and the public are talking about how afraid college students are — not of new ideas but of being shot on campus.
“Students go to college because they want jobs, they want to be educated or they want to be respected by others (or some combination of all three). A college or university implicitly promises them that it has the legitimacy to allow access, foster learning and confer status. The trick is that when universities play into the con game of moral panics about woke campuses, they become the thing we fear.”
SILS is hiring
The UNC School of Information and Library Science is hiring a Postdoc Research Associate role:
“We seek candidates with demonstrated record of research in the areas of visualization, human-computer interaction, health informatics, or closely related disciplines. The postdoctoral scholar will be expected to play a key role in a NIH-funded research project exploring the use of data visualization and related software technologies to combat bias and support equity within data-driven research. The postdoctoral scholar will help lead research related to this project, and have the opportunity to shape the team’s broader research agenda. Responsibilities will include research leadership, idea generation, software prototype design and development, prototype evaluation and user studies, mentorship of student researchers, and research dissemination.”
Affiliate Highlights
Saba Eskandarian, CITAP affiliate and an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had 2 recently published pieces: “Abuse Reporting for Metadata-Hiding Communication Based on Secret Sharing” and “Anonymous Complaint Aggregation for Secure Messaging.”
In “Abuse Reporting”, Eskandarian discusses abuse reporting on encrypted vs. non-encrypted platforms. If the contents of a message are end-to-end encrypted, like on WhatsApp, then the moderator cannot see the content of the message. Even if a user's device tells the platform what the message was, it cannot verify whether the report being sent corresponds to a real message sent over the platform or not, breaking the ability of the platform to moderate abuse reports for direct messages. Meta has developed a technique called "Message Franking" that allows users to verifiably report abuse, such that platform moderators who receive abuse reports can know they are real messages that went through the platform, but unreported messages continue to enjoy all the benefits of end-to-end encrypted messaging. Unfortunately, message franking only works in settings where the platform knows the identity of the sender/receiver of each message. Alternatives that apply to platforms that also hide the identity of the message senders from the platform (those that hide message metadata) incur 2-3 orders of magnitude more computational cost to support abuse reports. This paper shows how to extend the techniques of message franking to apply to a broad class of metadata-hiding messaging systems without incurring the prohibitive additional cost.
In “Anonymous Complaint Aggregation”, Eskandarian and co-author Connor Bell discuss how India wanted to mandate that WhatsApp offer the government traceability— the ability to identify the original author of any message; Brazil also expressed interest in doing this. If you're dealing with misinformation, reporting the person who sent you the misinformation doesn't get at the real culprit, who is probably several forwarding hops away in the past. The Indian government's proposal on how to implement this involved significantly weakening the security the platform offers its users. In response, some papers studied how one could try to implement a traceability mandate in a way that would minimize harm to the security properties of the platform, putting the ability to report misinformation in the hands of individual users, but then allowing platform moderators to see the originator of reported messages. Unfortunately, this approach has the fundamental flaw that any recipient of a message can somehow compromise the privacy of someone they never even spoke to. You could reveal to the platform the identity of the author of a piece of political speech you disagree with. This work explores how to augment such schemes so that a large number of users need to report a piece of misinformation before its author is revealed to the platform.
Coming soon
April
Media and January 6th: On April 12th, CITAP will be hosting an event in celebration and reflection of the launch of the book “Media and January 6th.”
Find more info about the panels, panelists, and schedule for the day here! UNC students are eligible to receive CLE credit for each panel.
Media Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: On April 16th from 6:00-7:30pm, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is hosting their annual Wade H. Hargrove Media Law and Policy Colloquium: “Media Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The event features David McCraw, Ruth Okediji, Nadine Farid Johnson, and Lyrissa Lidsky, and will be moderated by David Ardia.