Due to incelement weather, this event is being postponed. More details to come.
TikTok has dominated social platforms since the early stages of the pandemic. The New York Times reported that Gen Z uses TikTok over Google as their primary search engine. A study by NewsGuard reported that one in five search results on TikTok contains misinformation. On August 6, 2020, the Trump administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, yet nothing came of this ban. The problem isn’t just TikTok, it is the “big data” collected from all platforms. Digital technologies have evolved into normal habits in our everyday lives. How can we be more proactive in protecting our data online? Hear Aynne Kokas discuss her new book Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty in which she argues that exploitative Silicon Valley data governance practices help China build infrastructures for global control, and we have become the product.
About the Speaker/Author:
Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, director of UVA's East Asia Center, and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. She is also a non-resident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program. Kokas was a Fulbright Scholar at East China Normal University and has received fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Japan’s Abe Fellowship, and other international organizations. Her research and writings appear regularly in media outlets such as CNBC, NPR’s Marketplace, The Washington Post, and Wired.
About the Moderator:
Anton Sobolev is an assistant professor of political economy and cyber policy at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research questions the politics of using text analysis, machine learning, and casual inference. His most recent projects focus on mass protest, cybersecurity, and political control in autocracies. Sobolev’s main study is how digital technology shapes political behavior. He has works published both in American and Russian media such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, European Journal of Political Economy, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and Forbes-Russia.
Event Information:
6:00 PM Check-in & Reception (Cash bar & hors d'oeuvres); 6:30 PM Program; 7:30 PM Book Signing
Part of the Technology Today series