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If the First Amendment’s protections against government intrusion are a core tenet of American democracy, what happens when the chief regulators of speech are private technology companies? What is protected, who gets to decide, and what are the implications for our democracy?

The Founders created a representative republic rather than a direct democracy, designed to slow down deliberation so that majorities could rule based on reason rather than passion. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, new social media technologies have unleashed populist passions and accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating the very mobs, demagogues, echo ch...

In a well-functioning democracy, people do not live in echo chambers or filter bubbles; rather, citizens are exposed to myriad ideas and perspectives even if not their own. Constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein suggests that our current obsession with social media and our online friend groups narrow the scope of the kinds of daily and serendipitous interactions that might o...

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook set the stage for a promising digital revolution, providing tools that helped foster global friendships, let new voices be heard, and served as the ultimate democratizing force for information. But critics argue that rather than uniting and informing, social media deepens social and political divisions and erodes trust in the democratic...

Hate groups and hate-fueled incidents are spiking in America. The Southern Poverty Law Center, through aggregating media reports and gathered submissions from its website, recently catalogued 1051 acts of intimidation and hate in the first month after Trump won the presidency. What is the evidence of this rising tide, and what does it look like in our communities? What gro...

As the Supreme Court concludes another contentious term, it is once again reshaping the legal landscape. With cases on abortion, gun rights and social media — and potentially democracy itself — on the docket, this year’s rulings couldn’t be more consequential.

George Soros said social media platforms are the largest threat to democracy. Marc Benioff said we should regulate them like tobacco. Why? Every day, platforms like Facebook and YouTube point their supercomputers at two billion people’s minds to capture their attention, and in the process create social harms that include digital addiction, amplifying genocide, political po...

Get a behind the scenes look at the HBO documentary-news program, “Axios on HBO”, with its Executive Editor and the creative team behind the headline-making series. How did Axios translate its new style of journalism into television story-telling that the Poynter Institute calls "a major player in TV news" and the Baltimore Sun called "the show that almost everyone in the...

Modern campaigns combine psychology, data, analytics, and technology to persuade and mobilize voters. The smartest campaign teams try to be one step ahead of the voters they’re targeting, even as the 24-hour news cycle and the social media echo chamber move constantly to keep up with this unprecedented election. This session engages political scientists, experts, and campa...

After The Atlantic ran a cover story with the headline “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation of Kids?” a spate of stories and opinion pieces followed. The media was flooded with rants in comments sections, a former Facebook exec warned that social media is ripping apart our society, and Apple investors formally asked the company to take measures that would prevent iPhon...

What factors motivate people to make it to the polls in any given year, and what keeps them away? One thing we learned from 2016 is that predicting not only how people will vote, but if they will vote, is extremely complicated. How much impact do positive or negative ads on TV or social media have on voting rates? How and where will gerrymandering, or redistricting, be mos...

Trust is democracy’s most valuable asset; we simply can’t work together to solve large problems without it. Yet, trust is at an all-time low. Polling reveals that a majority of Americans do not trust government or the media, and — perhaps more concerning — they do not trust each other. The Aspen Institute’s program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation argues that when it...

Congress’s approval ratings are in the gutter, local candidates routinely campaign against Washington, and voter turnout for national elections rarely tops 60 percent. Politicians can be counted on to campaign against all things Washington and claim outsider status whenever possible. Yet our national media outlets cover the ups and downs of DC on a nonstop, 24-hour cycle....

Marty Baron has a larger-than-life reputation among journalists, who revere him one of the best editors in a generation. Multiple Pulitzer Prizes — and Oscar-winning narratives — only punctuate his passion for excellence in reporting. Since joining The Washington Post as executive editor in 2013, Baron has pursued the kind of investigative journalism for which the paper is...

In a recent book review, Wall Street Journal critic Bart Swain asks a penetrating question: “Isn’t the great problem of our politics precisely that so much of it can’t be conducted face to face?” Innumerable factors, ranging from the bubble culture of social media to the geographic distributions of population — north versus south, coasts versus middle America, urban versus...

Norman Lear is the prolific television writer and producer of stories about diverse American life—among them “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” and “Maude”—as well as a lifelong political and social activist. Khizr Khan is a Pakistani American lawyer, speaker at the 2016 Democratic Convention, and parent of US Army Captain Humayun Khan,...

Rural America has come to the nation’s attention. But much discussion in the media and coffee shops, at conferences and dinner tables, relies on incorrect or no data, largely idyllic or dystopic tropes and images, and opinion uninformed by rural experience. The full picture of rural America is quite different. It has gained population in the last two years. Agriculture emp...