Nate Persily Asks Whether Democracy Can Survive the Internet
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2020
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of the Lawfare Podcast's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Persily is also a member of the Kofi Annan Commission on Democracy and Elections in the Digital Age, which recently released a report on election integrity and the internet for which Nate provided a framing paper. Alongside his work on internet governance, Nate is also an expert on election law and administration. They spoke about the commission report and the challenges the internet may pose for democracy, to what extent the pandemic has flipped that on its head, and, of course, the 2020 presidential election.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | One of the interesting questions about the COVID-19 and the platform's response to it is whether |
| 0:40.6 | the more extreme measures that they've taken with respect to the pandemic are ones that they |
| 0:46.1 | would take more broadly. |
| 0:47.6 | So you're right that I think they're getting some goodwill by a lot of the decisions that |
| 0:52.9 | they've made, whether it's giving free advertisements to the WHO and the CDC or taking very aggressive |
| 1:00.0 | tax against COVID-related disinformation. |
| 1:03.5 | But there's a sense in which if they show that they're really good at doing this, that |
| 1:08.0 | there's going to be even greater pressure for them to adopt these measures as routine |
| 1:12.8 | when dealing with, say, election disinformation and the like. |
| 1:15.6 | And so they've been quite aggressive on disinformation with respect to the virus and taking down |
| 1:21.3 | whether it's false medical cures or all kinds of other false content. |
| 1:27.7 | I'm Quinta Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast April 2nd, 2020. |
| 1:35.3 | Welcome to another episode of our Arbordos of Truth series on disinformation. |
| 1:40.0 | This week Evelyn Dwick and I spoke with Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor |
| 1:45.0 | of Law at Stanford Law School. |
| 1:47.7 | He's also a member of the Coffee Annan Commission on Democracy and Elections in the Digital Age, |
| 1:52.9 | which recently released a report on election integrity in the Internet and for which Nate |
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