SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & DATA
HKS Researchers propose risk-centered framework to help regulate social media platforms
Scholars at Harvard Kennedy School are proposing a bipartisan path towards mitigating the growing negative consequences from social media. The final report from the Democracy and Internet Governance Initiative, “Towards Digital Platforms and Public Purpose,” provides a framework for assessing and acting on growing dangers to mental and physical safety, privacy, financial security, and social well-being posed by powerful, unregulated digital platforms such as Facebook and TikTok and malicious actors who take advantage of them. “Our foreign and domestic enemies seek to weaken our democracy through the erosion of truth, the amplification of lies, and the weakening of the body politic,” says Professor of Practice Nancy Gibbs, co-chair of the initiative. “It is long past time we act.” The scholars hope their approach will help policymakers pursue effective governance of social media platforms in the United States, even as the big platforms have consolidated their influence. The document is the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. | | | |
WHAT WE'RE WATCHING
Professor Gordon Hanson: “We were too optimistic about free trade and globalization. | | | | | |
SOCIAL POLICY
Professor Daniel Schneider on how the pandemic reshaped the socioeconomic landscape
Three years since the first lockdown, social scientists have gained perspective on how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the socioeconomic landscape of America along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Professor Daniel Schneider, co-director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy’s Shift Project, co-edited a recent special issue of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences in which researchers reviewed the ways that the pandemic impacted the country’s health, prosperity, and equality. Among the findings, Schneider says in a recent conversation, were that the pandemic exacerbated racial inequalities in a way that fell most heavily on Black and Latino people, especially in terms of employment. Other findings included that remote school operating procedures had the largest effects on reducing Black mothers’ employment, and that the broad-based safety net and stimulus response to the pandemic was largely inaccessible to undocumented Latino immigrants and even to some Latino immigrants with lawful immigration status.
Also see: Professor Matt Baum and the COVID States Project on where people who don’t trust vaccines get their COVID-19 information. | | | |
DEVELOPMENT & ECONOMIC GROWTH
CID’s relaunched Global Empowerment Meeting looks toward the future and greater impact
Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International Development focused its signature annual event, the Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM), on exploring climate solutions at a global scale. The conference at Harvard Kennedy School was co-hosted this spring by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability as part of Harvard Climate Action week, and it brought together more than 160 researchers, public policy officials, private sector leaders, civil society representatives, and philanthropists from 35 countries. More than 1,300 people worldwide also registered to watch the conference via livestream. In addition to speeches and panels, the conference also featured “Climate Incubation Rooms” facilitated by Harvard faculty, practitioners in the climate field, and students. Some of those ideas could become funded research projects, as GEM23 was also the launch platform for the GEM Incubation Fund, which supports collaborations between researchers and practitioners. Teams that develop research ideas will report back on their progress next year at GEM24. | | | |
SOCIAL INNOVATION & PHILANTHROPY
The first Happiness Lab symposium promotes happiness as more than just personal well-being
The Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, founded and directed by Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership Arthur Brooks, has an ambitious goal: to start a happiness movement. Using a rigorous, data-driven approach, Brooks is building the Happiness Lab, housed at HKS’s Center for Public Leadership, into a hub for the science of well-being where insights can be shared with new generations of public leaders. The lab’s inaugural conference, held over two days in June, brought together experts from across disciplines, from Harvard and beyond, to share their expertise and consider how their field will continue to grow. In a recent conversation, Brooks, who also teaches a class on happiness at Harvard Business School, discussed the event, the science of happiness, and its place in a school of public policy. | | | |
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