Speakers at the May 10 conference will include Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, and Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the independent US communications regulator.
LONDON – A quarter of the world's population – some 2 billion people – are expected to go to the polls by the end of 2024.
And while these elections will take place in countries such as the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom, there is one place where all these discussions will take place – the Internet.
Northeastern University's London campus will host a conference on May 10 that will bring together digital household names, including the owner of Facebook Meta and search engine giant Google, with UK and US regulators and leading academics.
Organized by Northeastern's Internet Democracy Initiative, the “Internet and Society: The Trans-Atlantic Research Future' conference will focus on the role of the internet in building democracy, society and markets.
Speakers will include Melanie Dawes, chief executive of UK communications watchdog Ofcom, as well as teachers from North East David Lazer and Brian Ball.
John Wihbeyassociate professor of Media and Technology at Northeastern and co-head of the Internet Democracy Initiative, said the build-up to the 2024 election was a catalyst for the conference.
“London is just an ideal place to have these kinds of conversations and talk about the ways in which different elections are interconnected thanks to the public square being hosted, somewhere, on global communication technology platforms,” Wihbey said.
“Whether it's Meta, Google, Telegram or X, these platforms obviously have enormous power in all these different national circumstances where elections are held,” he said.
The Internet, Wihbey said, has rallied democracies around big questions like curbing hate speech online, combating misinformation, preventing trolling and abuse, and addressing privacy and security concerns, disinformation of elections and the role of algorithms.
“There are so many things that are being asked in India, are being asked in the United States and are being asked in a number of countries in Africa and Latin America,” he said.
Wihbey, who has previously served as a research consultant for X (formerly known as Twitter), said that over the past 15 years in his research field, there has been a shift from viewing the internet and its impact on democracy with optimism. regarding it as “alarming” in its ability to “unleash various kinds of anti-social and anti-democratic forces in the digital space”.
The election, Wihbey said, is just one of many issues that can become polarizing online.
“Our Internet technologies can be a force for all kinds of change in society, with a variety of moral, ethical and normative dimensions. And they can be good and bad,” he said. “So I think researchers have focused more and more on harms and risks.”
His work with the Internet Democracy Initiative, funded by the nonprofit Knight Foundation, is an effort to ensure greater transparency in studying the risks associated with online impact on democracy, Wihbey explained.
He said one of the “temples” of the initiative is the National Internet Observatory, a project that aims to shed light on people's experiences on the Internet.
“Part of the goal of IDI is to build an ecosystem around this new observatory, this new tool,” he said. “Think of it almost like a telescope for observing the heavens, but instead we're observing the internet space.”
Wihbey hopes the London conference can become an annual event, having brought together some notable names from the industry for its first event.
There will be a keynote address from Professor Helen Margetts, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute and UK Government Advisor, as well as Claes De Vreese, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society at the University of Amsterdam.
Ofcom's Dawes will take part in a conversation with Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the independent US communications regulator
Meta's Peter Stern and Beth Goldberg, head of research at Jigsaw, the Google unit that investigates threats to open societies, will also participate in an industry panel.
Brian Ball, associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University London, who will open the day-long conference, said: “We have very distinguished academics from Europe as keynote speakers for this event.
“This is a clear signal that Northeastern University London is now open for research and research collaborations in the area of the conference title 'Internet and Society'.
“We also have some very impressive speakers from industry and regulatory bodies to round things off at the end of the day.
“I think this rightly shows that our research in these areas is not insular, but deals with the issues facing modern societies. We are interested in working in a cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary way to address them, so I am very excited about this opportunity.”
