This team proposes to identify and frame an integrated set of technical, regulatory, and policy reforms that would effectively constitute a novel restructuring of digital society. The package of legal and regulatory structures developed would redress harm and collectively place individuals on a more equal negotiating footing with the platforms while also developing a companion set of secure computer science tools and technologies that could be built into an application or protocol’s operations to make their effects on bias, user addiction, manipulation, etc. transparent to a wide range of governance bodies without compromising privacy.

The médialab at Sciences Po and the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown envision creating joint research on the influence of digital technologies on society. The two institutes have independently established successful research agendas that analyze social media and how it both reflects and influences modern social and political life. Working together on areas of shared research interests, this partnership seeks to synergistically build on and advance the cutting-edge work happening at each institute and connect the resulting findings to action-oriented audiences.

Machine learning is revolutionizing all spheres of life and making inroads in several critical applications spanning medical diagnosis to credit risk assessment for financial institutions. However, the data required is often distributed across multiple sources and poses severe privacy protection challenges. This project will design and make publicly available, concretely scalable secure multiparty computation protocols that can be applied in a wide range of circumstances, opening up the ability of researchers from medicine to the social sciences to analyze “big data” containing PII without risk of compromising individual identity.

As conflict and repression rise and environmental risks grow, people are fleeing their homes and seeking asylum worldwide. The resulting humanitarian crisis is being exacerbated by the rapidly spreading misinformation increasingly infecting all aspects of digital society. This project will pioneer new uses of public open-source organic data collected from trending social media and local news as well as more traditional data sources, to predict likely migrant flows to specific countries and to identify differences by area and topic in how misinformation spreads. The resulting tools would provide methods for early warning to humanitarian agencies, and inform those seeking to slow the spread of misinformation.

Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security has launched a multi-phase project – 360 Tech & Social Media: Innovation, Security, & Governance – to address areas of emerging technology that have profound implications for the public interest. Social media technologies have transformed global society so rapidly and ubiquitously that our systems of governance and collective ability to anticipate risk have been unable to keep pace. Our goal is to develop new governance models for social media and its attendant technologies in a multi-phase project that is already underway. With this grant, the Center will build on the research and domestic governance solutions developed by our high level Task Force in phase 1 and expand our research to examine the global landscape, including identifying ways in which competing regulatory and governmental approaches are incompatible internationally and how they may impact, and be impacted by, emerging technologies, such as virtual reality and Web 3.0. We will analyze and recommend the most promising levers for change globally, ranging from new legislation, regulatory action, technical solutions, and incentive structures, to third party oversight.

Focused on the challenges social media poses for national security, and using an innovative set of processes it has pioneered to identify and address the complex threats posed by social media domestically, the Center on Law and National Security will assemble a high-level task force of experts from diverse sectors to tackle the international dimensions of social media’s misuse by foreign nationals and governments as well as the challenges to trade posed by the myriad and often conflicting regulatory approaches different countries are taking.