RESEARCH & POLICY NOTES

CITP Seeks Transparency as Political Campaigns Exchange Money for Influence on Social Media Platforms

Voters should know when political campaigns pay social media influencers to promote a candidate, legislation or a cause on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, CITP’s Tech Policy Clinic argues in a filing with the Federal Election Commission. In the 7-page document filed in January, CITP Emerging Scholar Nia Brazzell and Clinic Lead Mihir Kshirsagar ask the FEC to “clarify that the disclosure rules that apply to ‘internet political communications’ include the paid promotion of political communications." They also cite, How algorithms shape the distribution of political advertising: Case studies of Facebook, Google, and Tiktok, a peer-reviewed study by CITP researchers Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan and Kshirsagar. The study analyzed the role of social media platforms in the 2020 election and found 30 influencers with ties to political groups.

Finding Clarity Amid the Chatbot Chatter

As “hype,” fears and confusion around artificial intelligence chatbots – like ChatGPT, which can generate content that reads as if it were written by a human – continue to dominate in tech news, journalists continue to look for clarity, context and the facts. Journalist Julia Angwin turned to Computer Science Professor Arvind Narayanan, a member of the CITP faculty, for perspective. You can read their entire conversation in Decoding the Hype About AI, Angwin's article in The Markup, but here are a few takeaways:

• AI chatbots generate content that is persuasive, not content that is true.
• There is an upside to using AI in content moderation; it can reduce human moderators' exposure to traumatizing content.
• Using AI prediction to make societal decisions can hurt those who most need help.

Narayanan also discussed ChatGPT in Reactions: Princeton faculty discuss ChatGPT in the classroom, an opinion piece in The Daily Princetonian.

Applications are now open for the Siegel Public Interest Technology Summer Fellowship!

CITP is happy to invite rising juniors and seniors to apply for the 2023 Siegel Public Interest Technology Summer Fellowship, which places students at federal, state and local agencies to gain experience working in the tech policy field. 

SPECIAL EVENT

UPCOMING EVENTS

• Wednesday, Feb. 15: CITP Distinguished Lecture Series: Jon Kleinberg – The Challenge of Understanding What Users Want, 4:30-6 p.m., Friend Center Convocation Room. Register via the link to attend in person.
• Wednesday, Feb. 22: CITP Distinguished Lecture Series: Thomas Ristenpart – Mitigating Technology Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence and Encrypted Messaging, 4:30-6 p.m., Friend Center Convocation Room. Register via the link to attend in person.
• Thursday, Feb. 23: Inclusive Futures: Disability and Technology, 4:30-7 p.m., Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, Room A17. Register to watch virtually.
• Tuesday, February 28: CITP Seminar: Amy Bruckman – Difficult Conversations Online—Two Empirical Studies and a Design Experiment, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
  306 Sherrerd Hall.
• Wednesday, March 1: CITP Distinguished Lecture Series: Alessandro Acquisti – Who Benefits from the Data Economy?, 4:30-6 p.m., Friend Center Convocation Room. Register via the link to attend in person.
• Wednesday, March 8: CITP Distinguished Lecture Series: Ed Felten – Scaling Arbitrum, from Lab to Product, 4:30-6 p.m.,Computer Science Building, Room 105.

BOOKS & BYLINES

• Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University, by African American Studies Professor Ruha Benjamin, a CITP associated faculty member, is among the Princeton Alumni Weekly’s list of recommended books for Black History Month.
• Sociology Professor Janet Vertesi, a CITP associated faculty member, wrote Data Free Disney, an article about her family’s adventure traveling off-the-grid at Disneyland, in Public Books magazine.
• Former CITP Fellow, Eszter Hargittai, a professor in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, has authored Social media were a poor information source in the pandemic, in the publication, Schweizer Monat. The piece summarizes findings from Hargittai's book, Connected in Isolation: Digital Privilege in Unsettled Times.

TECH TALKS

CITP Professor Arvind Narayanan delivered one of the responses at the Tanner Lecture: AI and Human Values with Seth Lazar at Stanford University. Narayanan’s response to an earlier talk on “Communicative Justice and the Distribution of Attention” can be viewed on YouTube at the 1:14 minute mark.

MEDIA MENTIONS

• Professor Janet Vertesi was quoted in Why we love anthropomorphizing space robots, a story in Business Insider India.
• CITP Advisory Council member Pablo Chavez, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was quoted in How the US Could Ban TikTok in 7 Not-So-Easy Steps, a story in Wired Magazine.
• CITP Professor Arvind Narayanan was quoted in Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists, an article in Nature. Narayanan was also quoted in the New York Times story, Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chatbots

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