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  • Yaël Eisenstat Joins Cybersecurity for Democracy as Senior Policy Fellow, Focusing on Democratic…

    Yaël Eisenstat Joins Cybersecurity for Democracy as Senior Policy Fellow, Focusing on Democratic Discourse and AI-Powered Political Messaging We are thrilled to announce the latest addition to the Cybersecurity for Democracy team — Yaël Eisenstat, a seasoned expert and thought…

  • Predicting Virality: How soon can we tell?

    Introduction The ability to predict viral content has clear ramifications for content moderation and harm mitigation. Under the resource constraints that most Trust and Safety teams face, knowledge of which adverse content (e.g. hate, harassment, misinformation etc.) will garner…

  • Data Wrangling: Missing Engagement Interpolation

    In our research, we at Cybersecurity of Democracy compare engagement dynamics and virality of Facebook news content across three languages: English, Ukrainian, and Russian. This required that we assemble the most detailed, multilingual ongoing data collection of content…

  • Lab Notebook: Can GPT tell us who to trust?

    Cybersecurity for Democracy finds that GPT-3.5 has mixed ability to accurately assess news outlets Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of emergent behaviors: skills not explicitly taught that appear as the number of parameters scales. OpenAI reports that GPT-4, the…

  • The Tidal Wave of Small Dollar Fundraising Hits Republican Shores

    Austin Botelho and Laura Edelson Nearly 20 years ago, a huge shift in campaign finance began with the failed presidential run of Howard Dean. Today, Dean is mostly remembered for his ‘Scream’ moment that doomed his campaign, but before that happened, he pioneered a new style of…

  • Lab Notebook: Chatbots as text classifiers. How good are they really?

    Like many small teams, we at Cybersecurity for Democracy face labor resource constraints that limit our ability to label data. Despite this, we want to ensure as much flexibility to pursue different data investigations as possible. Here, I mentioned generative models like LLMs…

  • Americans Have Moved On From Transgender Culture War Issues, But Politicians Have Not

    Transgender Rights, as well as social acceptance of Transgender Americans, has been an ongoing topic of conversation in the Republican Primary this year. To understand how ordinary Americans were engaging with news and political content on this topic, we used CrowdTangle to…

  • Republican Candidates’ Ads Remain Quiet on Trump’s Indictments

    Only Trump, Ramaswamy, and Johnson have mentioned the issue For the first time in United States’ history, a major Presidential candidate is running for office while simultaneously facing criminal prosecution. On March 30, 2023, a New York grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying…

  • Lab Notebook: New Features

    C4D is building better ways to understand how advertisers try to influence the public Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, and again in 2022, NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy created an online, free dashboard, Ad Observatory, designed to provide the public with a way to gain insight…

  • Roundup of Republican Presidential Candidate Digital Spending

    DeSantis and Trump lead the field in spending while political outsiders try to build name recognition The recent flurry of campaign announcements solidified the major contenders in the 2024 Republican primary race. With the initial Republican field set, the Cybersecurity for…

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