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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...
According to myth, Helen of Troy was “the face that launched a thousand ships” — her abduction having incited the Trojan War. Most of us can only dream of inspiring such passion, though studies show American women will spend over $200,000 on cosmetics in their lifetimes, and plastic surgeons report they are seeing “catapulting demand for facial plastic surgery and aestheti...
Has a movie ever changed your mind, the way you act, what you eat? Leads from Oscar-winning Judas and the Black Messiah and other media experts discuss how films are changing public conversations and capturing the attention of citizens and elected officials. Is the medium of the movie essential to societal progress? This panel will compel you to consider how films disrupt...
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently released an advisory stating that social media can pose a risk of profound harm to children’s and adolescents' mental health and well-being. Those who agree claim that excessive social media usage can make children experience low self-esteem and negative body image, while cyberbullying and online harassment can contribute to incre...
One in two girls say toxic beauty advice on social media causes low self-esteem, and seven in ten have felt better after unfollowing idealized beauty content. This research — and wider conversations surrounding social media use and its impacts on teens’ mental wellness — make this conversation more urgent than ever. Join creative and cultural expert Jess Weiner for #DetoxY...
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?
Around the world, a free and independent press stands as one of the last lines of defense against rising autocracy and democratic backsliding. Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who faces persecution at the hands of the Philippines government, addresses the stakes and what can be done. (Book signing to follow.)
Most of us are repulsed by hateful actions and feelings, and it often seems that the easiest — and most just — way of getting rid of hate is by getting rid of the speech that promotes it. Nadine Strossen has dedicated her career to the defense of civil liberties, and as a champion of the First Amendment, she cautions us to remember that speech, painful as some of it might...
This session considers the importance of trust, and a healthy distrust, in the well-being of a democracy and the role of the press in this equation drawing on the report of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy released Feb. 5, 2019 titled, “Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America.” What measures should local journalism, social media, and the public ta...
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...
Community health workers, social media networks, and local residents serve as the first line of defense against global health risks, especially infectious diseases and bioterrorism. While top-down initiatives provide essential resources to detect looming threats, including sophisticated surveillance and diagnostic tools, outbreaks are most likely to be detected first at th...
Americans aren’t dumb—at least individually—but something changed in the last ten years that made the country-as-a-whole stupid in an unprecedented way. And yes, it was social media. What was once a place to share cute kid pics became a place to score hits on enemies and undermine institutional trust, and the viral nature of social media empowered the far political extreme...
The crisis of loneliness poses as grave a threat to public health as obesity or substance abuse. It cuts across generations and reaches around the world. Katie Hafner calls it “a quiet devastation” and the poet Emily Dickenson writes that it is “the horror not to be surveyed.” Millions of people live with sparse human contact and research tells us that lonely people are mo...
How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psych...
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...
Young people have it rough. From 2007 to 2019, the number of adolescents who reported having a depressive episode jumped 60 percent. And that increase was before the pandemic, which forced most into Zoom school and social isolation. While adults have been studying the effects of social media on mental health, many in Gen Z are forging ahead using the platforms for good: to...
We live in an interconnected world of volatility and disruption. Systems are linked in a web of dizzying and only partially visible complexity, and change in any one domain has a swift impact on many others. Join Andrew Zolli in a walking tour of emerging tools – such as next-generation satellite imagery, social media, and advanced analytics – that allow us to make sense o...
A majority of Americans say that distrust is their default setting, fueled by growing distrust of democracy, media, and government, according to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer survey. The survey found that business is now the most trusted institution, filling the void left by paralyzed and incompetent governments, but that trust has simultaneously become localized: in my...
The 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer is the company’s 16th annual global survey, measuring trust in key institutions—business, NGOs, media, and government—in more than 28 countries. This year’s barometer reveals a growing trust disparity between the informed public and the mass population, and explores the opportunity this presents for business and CEOs to play a leading role...
Readers, viewers, and subscribers want and need accurate news and information, but as we attempt to navigate among publishers and platforms and networks, who is ultimately responsible for telling us the truth? Who should be held accountable for information that is inaccurate, intentionally misleading, or straight-up fake? And what can media and information organizations do...