Originally written for The Fletcher School’s Cyber in the Civilian Sector: Threats & Upheavals course, November 2020. Prompt: Compare and contrast the online disinformation environment of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Describe (1) the different factors contributing to disinformation during each election, (2) how regulators and content platforms…

Originally written for The Fletcher School’s Cyber in the Civilian Sector: Threats & Upheavals course, October 2020. Prompt: Suppose you are a policy and communications adviser at Facebook. You are asked to draft a memo proposing changes to the existing content moderation strategy that will improve the company’s ability to…

Originally written for The Fletcher School’s Cyber in the Civilian Sector: Threats & Upheavals course, September 2020. Prompt: Choose any country and write a memo describing (1) what types of content that country’s government has tried to remove, censor or block online, (2) how that country has implemented its censorship…

Originally written for Harvard Kennedy School Digital Platforms, Journalism & Information course, April 2020. In amassing a vast user base and becoming the hub for modern communication, social media platforms have transformed into online town halls and defacto editors. At its inception, Web 2.0 peddled a utopian vision of a…

Originally written for Harvard Kennedy School’s Digital Platforms, Journalism & Information course, March 2020. Foer’s “World Without Mind” frames the advent of technology monopolies as a successful project to mold humanity and human nature through the “reordering of production and consumption of knowledge” then imposed upon us. The industry’s once…

Originally written for Harvard Kennedy School’s Digital Platforms, Journalism & Information course, February 2020. The advent of the internet and digital media have introduced a new paradigm composed of a richer stream of information that travels quickly across time and space, and where the role of traditional news media has…

Originally written for The Fletcher School’s International Communication course, November 2019. The difficulties and lack of consensus in conversations about regulating content is due to its inherently close relationship to freedom of speech. There is more pressure on democracies than ever before to tackle events like domestic terrorist threats on…

Originally appeared on The Fletcher School’s Gender Analysis & Women’s Leadership blog, February 2020. Introduction France’s deeply sexist and misogynist society has caught up with it, as record femicide rates continue to creep up. Femicide is defined as the murder of a woman, and is often perpetrated by current or…

Originally written for The Fletcher School’s International Communication course, October 2019. The internationalization of media has given way to a new group of powerful stakeholders: moneyed media owners fostering an ecosystem of “uneven” globalization. This has fundamentally transformed what news gets written, how it’s distributed, and understood by the masses…