The seven categories of risk with both individual and community-level harms are:
- Mental and physical health or safety, through cyberbullying or radicalized terrorists
- Financial, such as phishing scams or predatory loans and credit abuses
- Privacy, through personal disclosures and “doxxing”
- Social and reputational risks such as exposure to danger, harm, or loss
- Professional, such as algorithmic bias in hiring
- Sovereignty, such as Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election
- Public goods, such as decline of robust local news coverage
The report, “Towards Digital Platforms and Public Purpose,” is the culmination of an initiative based in two Kennedy School research centers: The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center Nancy Gibbs, the Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Press, Politics and Public Policy, joined with Professor Ash Carter, then-director of the Belfer Center, to form the Democracy and Internet Governance Initiative in 2021. Carter, former U.S. defense secretary and a longtime advocate for harnessing technology for public good, died in October 2022. The digital initiative drew on the ideas of more than 100 experts and stakeholders in working groups and interviews over two years and produced detailed working papers including one on developing industry oversight standards.
In her introduction to the final report, Gibbs said she and Carter “both shared the perspective that digital platform governance is one of the great issues of our time. Today, 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 … . It is long past time we act.”
The final report argues that the central conclusion—shifting the American approach to an individual risk-centered model for analysis and action—should help move the governance debate away from partisan divisions and toward a more dynamic approach that would engage government, corporate, and nonprofit actors in targeted, nonpartisan action.
“We aim to pull the conversation away from the mainstream political dialogue and towards something that can be implemented in a bipartisan manner—and through collaboration of business, government, and civil society,” the study says.
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Banner illustration by Richard Mia; Inline illustration by Joey Guidone
