Managing Internet Risks With Citizen Behavioral Science

Speaker(s): Nathan Matias

Join us as Nathan Matias presents a lecture on “Managing Internet Risks with Citizen Behavioral Science.”

Because online platforms observe and intervene in the lives of billions of people, many have come to expect that they should address enduring social problems including misinformation, political polarization, hate speech, public health, and many others. Companies already conduct tens of thousands of behavioral studies on an unknowing public every year, so why not use that power for good?

Platform-based social change at scale will remain a risky, dangerous endeavor without progress on evaluation and public accountability. As the political history of experimentation shows us, the experimenting society we are creating needs work to be a democratic society. In this talk, you will hear about CivilServant, which supports citizen behavioral science for a fairer, safer, more understanding internet. Communities with up to tens of millions of people have used CivilServant to test ideas for responding to human/algorithmic misinformationpreventing harassment, managing politically-partisan conflict, and reducing the side-effects of AI law enforcement systems.

Nathan Matias is a computational social scientist who works with millions of people in citizen behavioral science toward a fairer, safer and more understanding internet. Matias advances this work through CivilServant and as a postdoc at Princeton University departments of Psychology, Sociology, and Center for Information Technology Policy.

Event details

Annenberg School for Communication