Hopkins Bloomberg Center, Room 1020
Americans are not alone in this election year: Russia, China, Iran, and other adversaries are actively looking to interfere in the American debate. What do we know about their efforts in the information and cyber spaces, both inside the US but also across the world? How effective are they? And can democracies compete with their own version of information war? Join SNF Agora fellows Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev – along with Sasha Havlicek, CEO of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and Renée DiResta, formerly of the Stanford Internet Observatory – to find out more.
Speakers:
Anne Applebaum is a journalist, a prize-winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, Autocracy Inc, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.
Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations, to spammers and scammers, to issues related to child safety. From 2019-2023 she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies.
Renée has advised Congress, the executive branch, and academic, civic, and business organizations on issues related to technology and policy, including information operations, generative AI, election security, researcher transparency, child safety, and more. At the behest of SSCI, she led outside teams investigating both the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society and elections, and the GRU influence campaign deployed alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election.
Renee is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has also appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by the Presidents Bush, Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations); an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
Sasha Havlicek is a social and policy entrepreneur who, for the last two decades, has incubated and scaled global initiatives to counter the rise of weaponized hate, disinformation and extremism, on- and offline. As founder of the leading global ‘think and do tank’, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), she has led the build-out of ISD’s advanced digital analytics capability, designed to detect and mitigate information threats to democracy, public safety and national security. Spearheading ISD’s extensive partnerships with governments, cities, businesses and communities, Sasha oversees the organisation’s global teams delivering research, policy advisory support, training, digital literacy and communications programming.
Sasha has advised a range of governments at the highest levels, has testified before US Congress and the UK Parliament, and is a regular commentator in the media (CNN, BBC, Channel 4 News and other networks). She is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Global Internet Forum on Counter-Terrorism, the Christchurch Call and the Global Partnership for Action against Tech Facilitated Gender Based Violence. She is a founding board member of the Forum on Information and Democracy and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition on Internet Safety.
Peter Pomerantsev is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, an author, and TV producer. He studies propaganda and media development, and has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He writes for publications including Granta, The Atlantic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, and Politico, among others. His first book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House, and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages.