Throughout the year, the Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries and Information hosts salons featuring experts on intermediary liability, online speech, and other relevant issues. These salons provide a valuable opportunity for students, ISP community members, and the public to learn about important topics directly from experts in academia, industry, government, and civil society.
Fixing FOIA: Comparative Solutions to America's Transparency Deficit (April 2021)
Virtually everyone who regularly uses the federal FOIA system can speak to its challenges as a mechanism for obtaining timely, comprehensive and unvarnished information on matters of public importance. One particular difficulty is in the oversight structure. Requesters who wish to appeal against a refusal to disclose information face a long, costly, and draining battle through the courts. This effectively means that only the most powerful and well-resourced applicants have any recourse against government non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. This event brought together representatives from two information oversight bodies, from Canada and Mexico, alongside the Executive Director of the Administrative Conference of the United States, to discuss comparative best practices in establishing and implementing an independent oversight body, and what potential considerations would be important in setting up that kind of an agency in the federal system.
The full event is available to view here.
Panelist: Oscar Mauricio Guerra Ford, Commissioner of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI)
Panelist: Matthew Lee Wiener, Acting Chairman, Vice Chairman, and Executive Director of the Administrative Conference of the United States
Panelist: Caroline Maynard, Information Commissioner of Canada
Moderator: Michael Karanicolas, Wikimedia Fellow, Yale Law School
Launch Events: Alternative Regulatory Responses to Misinformation (March 2021)
These panels present the results of a recent white paper series published by the Wikimedia Initiative on Intermediaries and Information at the Yale Information Society Project, which was designed to spur outside the box thinking on regulatory strategies for combating misinformation. The full paper series is available here.
Presenter 1: Akriti Gaur, Combating misinformation: Towards policy and regulatory approaches for India
Presenter 2: Ivar Hartmann, Associate Professor, Insper Learning Institution, Combining Ad Libraries with Fact Checking to Increase Transparency of Misinformation
Commenter 1: Barbora Bukovská, Senior Director for Law and Policy, ARTICLE 19
Commenter 2: Artur Pericles, Head of Research, Freedom of Expression, InternetLab
Presenter 1: Lisa H. Macpherson, Senior Policy Fellow, Public Knowledge, Addressing Information Pollution with a “Superfund for the Internet”
Presenter 2: Jonathan Obar, Assistant Professor, York University, Source Triangulation Skills and the Future of Digital Inclusion: How Information Literacy Policy Can Address Misinformation and Disinformation Challenges
Commenter 1: Sandra Cortesi, Director of Youth and Media, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Commenter 2: Stephen LaPorte, Legal Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Presenters: Jan Rydzak, Company Engagement Lead, Ranking Digital Rights & Elizabeth Renieris, Founding Director, Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, Better Processes Lead to Better Outcomes: Corporate Governance as a Tool to Address Misinformation
Commenter: Dunstan Allison-Hope, Vice President, Business for Social Responsibility