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Today’s social networking platforms bear scars from a decade of trolling, abuse and disinformation. With “toxic technocultures” presenting enormous challenges for the tech industry, how are companies responding to abuse on their platforms? For this installment of our Review series, I report back from Facebook’s 2021 summit on Non-Consensual Intimate Image Sharing (NCII). Often mis-labeled “revenge porn”, this is one of many abuses that networks seek to remove from their platforms. Here I explore how Facebook is approaching this problem,...

19 July, 2021

https://ia801407.us.archive.org/10/items/podcast-mixdown-20210709/Podcast_mixdown_20210709.mp3 "[Media] is very vulnerable, comparing with other things like schools, like universities, even like telecommunication systems and infrastructures. So the main concern is that if the Taliban is coming, what would be the discipline of the freedom of expression and those who are working with it?" What comes next for media in Afghanistan as the US makes its final military withdrawal and Taliban advances threaten to put an end to free reporting? In this episode, Center for Media at Risk Postdoctoral...

09 July, 2021

“When speakers came together in Lisbon in January 2020, they spoke of various themes—economic logics, communication practices, media activism, political accountability, environmental precarity—and also acknowledged what they did not know. Absent from all these talks was a topic that has now become part of the global lexicon: pandemics.”  The second Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication, aptly dedicated to the topic of “Media and Uncertainty,” convened just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic overtook the world in January 2020. We are...

08 July, 2021

By Azsaneé Truss The 2020 protests against police brutality that ensued following the murder of George Floyd galvanized the Philadelphia mural arts scene. A city with a rich tradition of activism and public art since the founding of Mural Arts Philadelphia in 1984, Philadelphia has become one of the most vibrant centers for public art works in the world, commissioning over 4,000 works of community-based public artworks since its founding. Though Mural Arts started as an anti-graffiti effort (appropriately called the...

16 June, 2021

Dr. Jennifer Peeples has examined the discourse and images of environmental protest and corporate response, and, most recently, the visual construction of toxicity. She recently spoke to Annenberg PhD candidate and Center Steering Committee Member Hanna E. Morris about the inspiration behind her work, including her forthcoming book Toxic Imaginary.   Your scholarship bridges many disciplinary divides—environmental communication, visual rhetoric and social justice (to name a few). Do particular issues or questions continually motivate your scholarship? Or have you found that...

24 May, 2021

After another competitive search, the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication is delighted to announce its Postdoctoral Fellows for 2021-2022, who will begin working with the Center this Fall. Congratulations to Chaz Barracks and Perry B. Johnson!  We are thrilled to welcome both Fellows, who will expand their research using interdisciplinary approaches and multi-media platforms to deepen the Center's emphasis on free and critical media practice and scholarship. Perry Johnson will be jointly affiliated with both...

18 May, 2021

Billie J. Winner-Davis is the mother of Reality Winner, the U.S. national security contractor who was sentenced to 63 months in prison for sharing one classified government document with The Intercept. She recently spoke to Annenberg PhD candidate and Center Steering Committee Member Muira McCammon about her experiences advocating for her daughter. This reflection traces Billie Winner-Davis’ journey and efforts to make sense of the institutional logics underlying the U.S. national security state.   Photo of Reality Winner (L) and Billie...

17 May, 2021

Journalist Gabe Schneider is acutely aware of — and vocal about — the problems facing the media industry. As co-founder and lead editor of The Objective, a publication dedicated to media commentary by and for people who are underrepresented in newsroom leadership, he’s been described as someone who is “quietly fixing journalism.” In the latest installment of the Center for Media at Risk’s Reflections series, Schneider spoke with Louisa Lincoln, Steering Committee Member and Annenberg doctoral student, about journalism, objectivity and...

19 April, 2021

What Could a Biden-Harris Administration Achieve for Reproductive Rights? Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court marks a constitutional crossroads in relation to sex discrimination and reproductive rights. While some states are poised to expand provisions, 2020 also saw more anti-choice women elected to congress than ever before. From a Catholic adoption agency in Philadelphia refusing to serve gay families to the Texas legislature ignoring its maternal mortality rates in favor of anti-choice legislation, sex discrimination and reproductive health issues...

16 April, 2021

January 27 (12-1pm) Roundtable: Counter-DataveillanceElif Ince, Burak Arikan, Jin Zhu and Zeyno Ustun February 10 (12-1pm)  Colloquium: “It’s not an easy kind of practice here”: Journalism and Its Challenges in South SudanRichard Stupart  March 17 (12-1pm)  Roundtable: Exploring Rupture and Repair Through Multimodal ScholarshipWinnie Yoe, Anula Shetty, Michael Kuetemeyer and Roopa Vasudevan April 7 (12-1pm)  Roundtable: Sex, Power & Democracy: What Could a Biden-Harris Administration Achieve for Reproductive Rights?Galina Espinoza, Imani Gandy and Sophie Maddocks April 21 (12-1pm)  Film Discussion: Movement at the Margins Maori Karmael Holmes,...

23 January, 2021

Trolling has become a powerful shaper of mainstream political discourse. In response, it is crucial that journalists produce comprehensive and critical news coverage of trolls. This report by Center Steering Committee Member Sophie Maddocks explores how journalists write about trolls and how coverage of trolling could be improved. The first part of this report identifies weaknesses in news coverage of trolls, finding a pattern of narrow and stereotypical reporting among many news outlets. The second part of this report offers...

14 January, 2021

https://ia801507.us.archive.org/15/items/podcast-episode-17/Podcast%20Mix%20-%2020210202_mixdown.mp3 "Access is quite complicated. And there's a huge financial component. And a lot of people, both the Americans and the Somalis, in this case, the Americans, a lot of people from all over the world benefit from that, from that lack of access." photo credit: manybits In this episode, journalists Amanda Sperber and Jack Hewson compare notes on what it’s like to navigate the risks of reporting from Somalia and Iraq respectively, sketching a picture of some of the life of modern...

11 January, 2021

Protests in Nigeria have cast a shadow of doubt on the government’s intentions and ability to roll out an equitable, effective COVID-19 response. Leadership’s response to the End SARS protests has served as a reminder to Nigerians that the needs of the majority have not been prioritized, even in times of crisis. This report by Chioma Woko, a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, traces the context around these protests and what the government’s ensuing actions forebode for...

11 December, 2020

This information security project is aimed at educating media makers on ways to improve their digital security to better protect themselves, their sources and their journalistic role from actors intent on disruption, compromise and harassment. Written by Steering Committee Member Jennifer R. Henrichsen; infographic created by Emma Fleming, Annenberg’s Digital Designer. Media makers in all of their capacities, from documentary filmmakers and entertainment screenwriters to ordinary citizens, are at risk in a society in which their information, communications and identities can be...

11 December, 2020

https://ia601505.us.archive.org/11/items/episode-16_202012/20201116%20M%40R%20Podcast%20-%20COVID%20in%20African%20Newsrooms_mixdown_final.mp3 “Journalists were asking a lot of questions. Now how do I do interviews?” In this episode, Center Researcher Richard Stupart speaks with journalists from newsrooms in South Africa, Nigeria and South Sudan. Ajibola Amzat, Branko Brkic and Isaac Kenyi share about how the pandemic has affected the way media practitioners do their work. This podcast is the second entry in our three-part series spotlighting COVID-19 media in Africa. CREDITS Richard Stupart is a researcher working on the practices and normative ethics of journalism of...

09 December, 2020

As we enter another grim chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care advocate and journalist Dr. Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor recently spoke to Annenberg doctoral student and Steering Committee Member Adetobi Moses about the ways the media landscape, health organizations, and informal information channels and networks can adapt to provide adequate and lifesaving information that meets the needs of those in the global south as well as the global north. It is widely assumed that statistics are the language and currency of...

19 November, 2020

Review by Megan Genovese with contributions from Florence Madenga "Documentary brings us into intimacy with strangers, creating space to stand in awe of their courage, have compassion for their pain, and become angered and determined on their behalf. It gives us the resources to be more mindful and deliberate in unmaking and creating our shared world." The 6th annual Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival, held remotely for the first time, ran October 14-18, 2020 across live panels, workshops for career development and...

28 October, 2020

With the November 2020 election only weeks away, Young Mie Kim’s research on social media disinformation campaigns is critically important and timely-as-ever. For this Reflection, Center for Media at Risk Steering Committee member Jeanna Sybert spoke with Kim about her work and objectives as the Center's Fall Visiting Scholar. Your research has centered on the nature of political communication in media environments and particularly on how it manifests in digitally mediated environments. Some of your most recent work here has been...

28 September, 2020

https://ia801503.us.archive.org/1/items/fearless-speech/Sophie%27s%20podcast%20-%20final.mp3 "If we actually care about risky speech, if we actually care about the speech of the vulnerable, if we care about speech that does something to make us think twice about the status quo, then those are the kinds of conversations that should be getting a lot more attention as free speech issues." ~Mary Anne FranksIn this episode, Annenberg doctoral student Sophie Maddocks speaks with leading legal scholar and cyber civil rights advocate Mary Anne Franks, whose 2019 book The Cult...

04 September, 2020

For this installment of our Reflections series, I had the opportunity to interview groundbreaking victims’ rights attorney, Carrie Goldberg. Carrie works to make online spaces safer by holding abusers – and social networks – to account. She takes trolls to court, ‘sues the hell out of tech’ and confronts police departments that ignore internet crimes. Her firm has obtained major settlements for child sexual abuse victims from the New York City Department for Education, and she currently represents two victims...

25 August, 2020
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