Internet Health

Jonathan Bellack argues that Bluesky is nearing the end of the timeframe in which it can build a truly participatory content moderation process.

BKC Affiliate Kathy Pham introduces The United States Digital Service Origins, an oral history of the USDS featuring nearly 50 interviews telling the story of technology and…

Mailyn Fidler's latest research paper posits that internet fragmentation hasn't been as inward-looking as theorists have often suggested.

Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain probes policy questions raised by the “assumptions” large language models make about users.

MuckRock hosted an online discussion among experts fighting for more meaningful transparency in the face of DOGE, including Clinical Instructor Mason Kortz.

Fellow Maria Xynou and Arturo Filastò of the OONI Foundation analyze network-level censorship of Telegram during Kenya's 2023 and 2024 KCSE exams, revealing fragmented enforcement…

Naomi Shiffman and Brandon Silverman present their 'case for transparency,' highlighting cases demonstrating the positive impacts of platform transparency across spheres.

Jon Penney and Nathan Matias offer commentary on a 2023 lawsuit filed against Meta which alleged that its social media platforms harm young users' mental health.

At a workshop organized by Faculty Associates Elettra Bietti and Aileen Nielsen, along with Laura Aade, participants—including many members of the BKC community—examined how…

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar reflects on his time on Microsoft's AI Red Team, a group of technical experts who emulate real-world cyberattacks to allow companies to strengthen their…

"As AI embeds itself more deeply in our society, we need a conversation about authenticity in culture, technology and politics." Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman explores the…

Rumman Chowdhury joins Science Friday to discuss the state of artificial general intelligence.

The New York Times features a quiz based on Faculty Associate Jeffrey Hall's recent book.

Wendy Chun, Christian Sandvig, and Christo Wilson participated in a panel to determine what makes an AI audit effective and trustworthy.

RSM Visiting Scholar Eric Gilbert and coauthors argue that we need new laws to expedite the takedown of non-consensual intimate media (NCIM).

Anupam Chander argues that a national security approach to internet regulation is economically and politically risky.

Fay Johnson considers social media platforms' decisions about which speech to censor and which to allow.

Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejías warn against “data colonialism” and call for grassroots resistance to Musk's interference in the US Government.

"Resilience is a prevention problem, and prevention does not attract money."

“Firms have set out to quantify or reduce all elements of workers’ experience to data.”

Jim Cowie and colleagues identify four primary threats to internet resiliency, and propose nine initiatives that balance immediate needs with long-term resiliency measures.

Mark Esposito and coauthor Eduardo Araral explore how blockchain technology can enhance the governance of digital commons by providing transparent, secure, and decentralized…

“Too accurate AI could imminently create substantial particularized harms to individuals as well as widely dispersed costs to society,” argues Faculty Associate Aileen Nielsen.

ASML Fellow Fay Johnson discusses the ins and outs of Meta’s decision to cut back on fact checking with the True Thirty podcast.

Ethan Zuckerman and coauthors raise concerns about AI companies using user-generated social media data to train their LLMs.

Bruce Schneier and coauthor Barath Raghavan argue that all talking AIs and robots should use ring modulators to make themselves distinguishable from human speech.

Affiliate Jack Cushman works to archive datasets that have disappeared from data.gov in the days since Trump's inauguration.

Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman discusses the widening opinion gap between the country's politicians and its public.

Rebecca Rinkevich offers insight into the shifting media landscape in the wake of TikTok's short-lived ban.

Nishant Shah warns that Meta's doing away with content moderation represents a dangerous lack of oversight.

BKC faculty associate and Campus AI board member, Dariusz Jemielniak, argues, we need a clear rule, a Fourth Law of Robotics—as an addition to Asimov’s classic code.

In a Q&A with Harvard Law Today, Rebecca Tushnet weighs in on Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a Texas case asking whether websites hosting sexual material can be required to…

James Cowie, Emile Aben, and Alun Davies analyze three recent cuts to Internet cables in the Baltic Sea.

Lumen's database catalogues takedown requests for merchandise related to United Healthcare and Luigi Mangione.

With a group of coauthors, RSM Visiting Scholar Marshall Van Alstyne asks when AI is the right tool for the job.

BKC Director and co-founder Jonathan Zittrain breaks ChatGPT.

Darius Kazemi and Erin Kissane discuss their recent work on the 'fediverse,' continuing to make the case for federated and decentralized social platforms.

BKC affiliates and alumni are among the co-authors of a paper that envisions the future of the data economy.

BKC-Nieman Fellow Ben Reininga and Nieman Fellow Jesselyn Cook share their insights on how platforms navigate the spread of conspiracy theories, and the impact they have on…

Phineas Rueckert, a lead Project Coordinator at Forbidden Stories, discusses his organization's collaborations with Lumen.

SEO wizards are quietly reshaping AI's digital playground, warns Sean Harvey.

Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, and coauthors propose a new agent behavior simulator that addresses the biases and errors of previous models.

Bellack comments on the growing "X diaspora" as users flee to other platforms.

Ben Brooks warns that the AI search industry threatens to disrupt the digital economy.

Jay Beck weighs in on Curious GeorgePT, an AI model developed to allow for more targeted responses to prompts.

Marshall Van Alstyne raises concerns about platforms enabling election conspiracies.

The military tactics used within Palestine and Lebanon demand a reckoning with the "normalization of techno-terror."

Judith Donath likens AI 'decision-making' to a coin flip.

ASML's Darius Kazemi makes a case for the Fediverse Schema Observatory, a means of increasing interoperability among decentralized and federated social media networks.

BKC director Jonathan Zittrain explains what AI agents are, and why we need to regain control of them.

Jim Cowie and Maria Xynou join an M-Lab Community Call to discuss challenges to constructing and using internet performance datasets.

Sameer Hinduja and Justin W Patchin explore teenagers' use of virtual reality and the particular harms that they encounter therein.

Adam Holland shares why tracking takedowns is critical public information.

Maria Xynou details the latest censorship campaign against OONI Explorer.

The Online Investigations Toolkit helps open source researchers discover new tools, and understand their uses and limitations.

An OONI-sponsored report investigates internet censorship in Kazakhstan.

Eric Gilbert and coauthors use AI-generated nude images to test whether X's takedown algorithms take non-consensual intimate media seriously.

What challenges do practitioners face when implementing Algorithmic Impact Assessments?

The Cyberlaw Clinic welcomes the SJC's holding that the BPD violated the law by refusing to turn over evidence of potential online racial profiling.

HKS's Behind the Book series covers Bruce Schneier's latest work.

Juan Ortiz Freuler breaks down the latest information on the case against Pavel Durov.

Juan Ortiz Freuler and Apunam Chander weigh in on the arrest of Pavel Durov.

Wendy Seltzer and Tom Zick consider the efficacy of implementing "personhood credentials" as means to deter bad actors online while maintaining users' anonymity.

Ethan Zuckerman explores how the Crowdstrike outage makes computing farm more vulnerable than it ought to be.

The New York Times chronicles the latest in Ethan Zuckerman’s lawsuit against Meta.

Manon Revel introduces evaluate metrics for rewards models' alignment with the values expressed in training datasets.

Lumen details a slew of wrongful takedown requests, many of which target local news URLs.

Amidst escalating online scapegoating, offline attacks are rising, writes Alejandra Caraballo.

Ethan Zuckerman writes about the relationship between human-generated content and AI models on the internet.

Jeffrey Hall writes about the loneliness epidemic and how to address its core.

Diana Freed sits down with Ethan Zuckerman to talk about digital safety for young people and survivors of intimate partner violence.

"The rise of deep fakes and other AI-generated misinformation presents a direct threat to women’s freedom."

Ethan Zuckerman discusses his decision to sue Meta.

Molly White writes about the state of the crypto industry.

Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier warn that, without intervention, the continued expansion of generative AI will end the Web's utility as a public resource.

Bruce Schneier writes about a recent potential cybersecurity catastrophe.

Joe Bak-Coleman speaks about the debate on kids' mental health and the relationship to social media and smartphones. “Ninety percent of this debate is basically just back…

Alejandra Caraballo discusses her experiences with content moderation issues on Elon Musk's X and the lack of trust and safety mechanisms on the platform.

Jonnie Penn argues that the increased incorporation of AI into our lives may harm our basic hygiene.

Nathaniel Lubin writes about internet "junkification."

Sameer Hinduja, Nighat Dad, and coauthors detail the troubling proliferation of deepfakes and the various legal, technological, and even user-education-focused interventions…

Jeffrey Hall discusses research around making friendships in the workplace.

Jeffrey Hall discusses making friends online.

BKC Graduate Student Fellow Dylan Moses joins Jeff Horwitz and Latanya Sweeney to discuss Horwitz's book, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets.

RSM Alumna Elissa Redmiles summarizes her collaborative work on the (in)accuracy of user estimates of TikTok usage, and lays out the implications: 

Susan Benesch and Catherine Buerger use the context of fentanyl and border crossings to explain the dangers of combining facts, lies, and emotional language.

Ethan Zuckerman writes about social media getting smaller, allowing for more people to connect, but also more extremism to arise. 

BKC Faculty Associate Sameer Hinduja provides insight on the impacts of online bullying in children.

Bruce Schneier co-authors a piece in The Atlantic discussing human interactions and the impacts of AI on them.

Leah Plunkett writes about how algorithms can quickly become privacy violations.

Juan Ortiz Freuler examines the handling of user requests to access Web content via links within mobile apps in the Apple iOS ecosystem.

Faculty Associate Ben Grosser and RSM Executive Director Rebecca Rinkevich comment on the potential dawn of the social media pluriverse.

BKC Affiliate Molly White argues that Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX exposed the greater fragility of cryptocurrency.

BKC Affiliate Molly White discusses crypto's future after the collapse of FTX.

BKC Faculty Associate Larry Lessig discusses Twitter, now X, a year after Elon Musk's takeover of the platform.

BKC Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman suggests that in certain markets turning to cooperatives may fight the "enshittification" of the tech economy.

BKC Faculty Associate Ben Grosser comments on the potential end of the big platform social media party.

BKC Senior Research Coordinator Kaylie Mayberry explains how increased use of generative AI may degrade online communities. 

BKC Affiliate Micaela Mantegna spoke about avoiding mistakes made with the internet in the metaverse.

Evelyn Douek writes with Genevieve Lakier about the free speech ramifications of Twitter v Taamneh...

BKC Responsible AI Fellow Rumman Chowdhury co-writes a piece on the shortfalls of platforms fighting online abuse.

Amid a mass movement of users from Twitter to other platforms, Ethan Zuckerman proposes a new way of taxonomizing social networks using two axes of governance: who owns a platform…

BKC Faculty Associate Abbey Stemler was interviewed about TikTok’s legal liability for failing to protect children from inappropriate content.

Evelyn Douek, BKC Faculty Associate, writes about how to improve content moderation. "Content moderation should be understood as a project of mass speech administration and…

David Weinberger discusses the shift in Twitter’s appeal to the right following Musk’s takeover. “It’s easy to understand why the right is overall so happy with what Musk has…

BKC Affiliate Elettra Bietti explores the distinctions and assumptions around platforms' functioning in markets. 

BKC Fellow Kesa White writes about extremism and its links to identity and gender.  "Identities make people unique and allow them to live their truth…

RSM Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman writes about the challenges of managing human behavior, especially as applied to Twitter.  “On a social network, interactions between…

BKC Faculty Associate Evelyn Douek discusses Twitter's content moderation practices in different areas of the world.  Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist,”…

BKC Affiliate Joe Bak-Coleman writes about conceptualizing activity on Twitter as a “cybernetic super-intelligence” as described by Elon Musk.

BKC Faculty Associate Zeynep Tufekci writes about disinformation and "prevent[ing] another Alex Jones." “It has become so easy to lucratively lie to so many people, and we…

Rebooting Social Media Assembly Fellow and Integrity Institute Co-founder Sahar Massachi's work with the Integrity Institute's weekly misinformation dashboard was featured in The…

BKC Fellow Bruce Schneier writes about the Uber hack. "In all of these cases, the victimized organizations could have very likely protected our data better, but the reality is…

Jad Esber writes about how the Web3 model can change how digital companies operate and handle data. “A major change is coming to the internet. While today’s dominant platforms…

BKC Faculty Associate Susan Benesch writes about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and implications for content moderation and social media enforcement.

Elettra Bietti traces "the origins and evolution of digital regulation from its early cyberlibertarian roots to contemporary debates around the governance of digital platforms."

Ethan Zuckerman points out room for improvement in Facebook's openness to misinformation research.

Jonathan Zittrain shares the ways humanity’s knowledge can change or disappear without warning on the Internet

Jon Penney outlines a new framework for understanding "chilling effects" on speech.

Shreya Tewari interviews journalist Aroon Deep

The Verge features study from John Bowers and Jonathan Zittrain

A study by John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles from 1996 through mid-2019.

Tunde Okunoye shares an overview of developments in digital rights in Africa for the BKC Medium Collection.

Faculty Associate Jeffrey Hall posits the "social biome" as a term encompassing "the individual ecosystem of relationships and interactions that shapes our emotional,…

Jad Esber shares a curated set of provocations focused on why the internet is broken and what needs to change.

Tunde Okunoye urges a rethinking of advocacy strategies against internet shutdowns

The Lumen project’s annual report highlights the technical improvements, research, outreach, and data collection from the last year.

Lumen database hosts DMCA notice for the tweet

The Lumen Database helped a researcher uncover widespread fraud and aided in a criminal charge.

Berkman Klein Center’s Lumen database helps bring attention to falsified court orders

The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see

The Committee to Protect Journalists used Lumen in an investigation of Indian government censorship of Kashmiri journalism.

Lumen shows why Twitter took down a video posted by President Trump

Valentin Weber tracks the global diffusion of repressive information controls and techniques

Internet Monitor paper offers insight into current events

2017 Report from Internet Monitor informs online censorship in India

The inventor of the World Wide Web has a new vision to rescue it.

Ethan Zuckerman envisions a review service built in Solid

The co-chairs of the Re-decentralization of the Web Reading Group at BKC share their thoughts on decentralization and a reading list from the year

How the internet can contribute to individual and group radicalization.

Leveraging expertise to understand social media's role in gang activity

An analysis of over 6,000 articles about the recent tragedy reveals useful guidelines for journalists on reporting extreme content

Global action is required to tackle the web's "downward plunge to a dysfunctional future", its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told the BBC.

As internet technology continues to be an important part of humanity’s lived experience, humanity as a whole must be empowered to dictate their desired experience.

"The planned changes will undermine freedom of expression and privacy online, weakening Indian democracy itself."

A profile of "Data Cowboy" Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, who trains security algorithms

"Digitalpolitik," is an emerging tactical playbook for how governments use their political, regulatory, military, and commercial powers to project influence in global, digital…

A new bill would prevent tech companies from knowingly doing harm to their users.

Technology and Development in an Anti-Black world for a better world require an inquiry into the nature of power.

We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure…

How GNI works to counteract the pressures on companies to act in ways that may pose risks for users’ rights

Jonathan Zittrain says the chances that the Internet will be a engine for positivity are lower than they were ten years ago

An American internet rife with hyperpartisanship and stratified along race, gender, and class lines, versus a Chinese internet tranquil and free of abuse

World of Warcraft and the study of online communities

The shift away from social exchange and toward markets, and what this means for the sharing economy

A service providing off-grid communications services to everyday people received the grand prize at the Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society (WINS) Challenge from Mozilla…

To understand how digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking it, you have to look beyond the technologies themselves.

The wider adoption of encrypted protocols for website delivery — HTTPS — could have uncertain long-term implications for online access to information around the world.

How social media bans reshape the filter bubble

Navigating and Understanding Digital Rights in Pakistan

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain discuss what a tech-positive future looks like—and how we can get there.

Journalist Arzu Geybullayeva discusses censorship, threats, and human rights in Azerbaijan

"The US has neglected the role of other rights and non-state entities in guaranteeing online freedom"