The Weaponization of Information, Institutions, and the Economy
SIS is thrilled to welcome Professor Ann Fitz-Gerald, Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, our partner school in Canada, for a timely discussion on the weaponization of information (and disinformation), institutions (law, security and bureaucracy), and the economy.
Kenya v Big Tech: Platform Accountability Across Borders
For years, digital rights activists across the Global South have complained about various harms linked to social media platforms; today, several are taking Big Tech to court. Kenya is currently host to unprecedented lawsuits against Meta Inc. (formerly Facebook).
Josh Tucker: Propaganda is already influencing large language models: Evidence from training data, audits and real-world usage.
Join Joshua Tucker as he reports on a concerning phenomenon: political propaganda influences large languages models (LLMs) through their training data. His five studies provide evidence that Chinese state media affects LLM outputs. His findings suggest that as generative AI spreads, states may have incentives to inject more propaganda into training data, raising concerns about AI’s role in shaping political narratives.
The Rise of Cyber Ambassadorships in Democracies
Since the invention of the Internet, states have principally focused on building their cyber capabilities in the realm of the military. Only recently have they started to add high-profile diplomacy to their cyber toolbox, through the creation of special ambassadorships to cyberspace. What explains this development? We argue that democracies are becoming increasingly attentive to the subversive effect of cyber-threats on shaping public opinion and eroding trust in democratic institutions. Empirically, we expect this shifting threat perception to be reflected in an increased investment in cyber diplomacy to advance the creation of shared norms and regulations. Our paper presents new global data on all cyber ambassadorships in democracies and shows that a higher number of cyber-threats against a democratic state is significantly associated with an increased probability of this state creating a cyber ambassador position. This relationship is conditional on a country's wealth. The findings demonstrate how shifting threat perceptions impact states' foreign policy decisions as they pertain to cyberspace, thereby contributing to our understanding of the role of emerging technologies in international relations.
U.S. Government Responses to State-Sponsored Cyberattacks (2014-2024)
What is the appropriate response to a state-backed cybersecurity breach? Most governments make no public response whatsoever, choosing in many cases not to even acknowledge the incident has occurred, but for more than a decade, the U.S. Government has experimented with a variety of different legal, technical, and economic retaliatory tactics. This talk will review three different sets of responses by the United States: indictments of state-sponsored hackers, technical take-downs of state-affiliated hacking infrastructure, and economic sanctions aimed at cutting off revenue to state-backed entities responsible for cyberattacks.