Jessica Brandt - Mentions and Appearances
Jessica Brandt is policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution and a fellow in the Foreign Policy program’s Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology. Her research interests and recent publications focus on foreign interference, disinformation, digital authoritarianism and the implications of emerging technologies for liberal democracies.
[With regard to the removal of legacy verification on Twitter:] It’s an information integrity nightmare. Blue check marks were originally intended to be signals of information quality, and putting them up for sale is a pretty quick way to destroy that functionality.
[The lack of a comprehensive data privacy law in the U.S. puts the nation] out of step with its peers. I don’t know that it’s the panacea or only policy approach that can mitigate some of the harms that generative AI can pose, but it’s one that we absolutely need and that Congress should pursue.
Russia is very effective at building on sentiments that already exist. It’s fertile ground and they’re well-practised.
Washington really needs to resist the temptation to respond to information manipulation in kind because doing so can only undermine its own moral authority. Democracies depend on a healthy information space to thrive, so polluting that space will ultimately do more harm to ourselves than our competitors.
I think this case highlights how consequential researchers’ choices about collaboration can be and how important it is that the academic community develop codes of conduct to guide those choices.
Beijing has an interest in not letting nationalist sentiment get out of hand in a way that would undercut its foreign policy, in particular, its interest in easing tensions with Japan. What’s interesting in this case is that at least one senior figure, [former Global Times editor] Hu Xijin, came out right away to try to tamp down some of the fervour, and the foreign ministry and state media coverage have really played it quite straight.
Putin is an opportunist, and he's going to use [cyber and information operations] in combination with one another.
The phenomenon that we’re catching here is that search engines are working as they’re designed to — they’re supposed to surface the most fresh, recent, relevant news articles. But The New York Times or other credible, authoritative, independent sources are going to debunk a conspiracy theory like the Fort Detrick conspiracy once and they’re going to move on. And Beijing’s propaganda apparatus does not need to move on — they can churn out a vast array of content that hammers this theory over and over and over again.
The issue is that Chinese state media, which isn't really beholden to resource constraints or audience feedback, can churn out a large volume of propaganda on a conspiracy it wants to promote. The high volume of material makes it easier for Chinese publishers to take advantage of the way search works to promote fresh content.