Policy Solutions for Online Mis/Disinfor
Policy Solutions-Online I
While 2016 may have been the wake-up call, it is clear that what scholar Joan Donovan calls “the weaponization of the misinformation machine” has only gotten worse since then. The political, social, and psychological damage caused by the intensive dissemination of online mis/disinformation has been profound. However, much has been learned about how to address the problem, so we will emphasize understanding the role of Big Tech in circulating and profiting from online mis/disinformation and what policies/regulations are in play. This semeste,r we are paying particular attention to the aftermath of the 2024 election landscape and the strange post-truth environment we find ourselves in.
The first part of this course will focus on understanding mis/disinformation online. What exactly is it? Why should we care? What are the implications for Democracy? Who is the cast of characters creating mis/disinformation online? After we’ve understood these topics we will examine the fixes being proposed and tried globally. We will consider both the demand and supply side of the problem and national context shapes the solutions being tried. We will look at the pros and cons of efforts to promote responsible news consumption, enhance media literacy, fact-checking, and new regulations. Along the way, we will also discuss content moderation, platform liability, disclosure requirements for election advertising, and support for journalism.
Students who take this class will develop an understanding of:
The problem of online misinformation and disinformation— who is putting it online and what are their interests?
Familiarity with the universe of solutions that are being tried and the pros and cons of each approach
- 3 points
Internet Governance and Human Rights
Internet Governance & Rig
Whoever controls the future of the internet, controls the future of the world.
We will study the technical roots of the internet, and the governance models engaging stakeholders – people and entities like telecom companies and their regulators, technologists and idealists, security forces and hackers – in constant tension. Each group faces challenges. Policymakers attempt to understand new technologies and their impacts, and hurry to update and replace laws, regulations, and norms for the digital age. Companies have responsibilities to law and policy but vary widely in their respect for users and responsiveness to governments. The UN Sustainable Development Goals identify new technologies as essential to development, but fail to extend connectivity to vulnerable or marginalized communities. And the cat-and-mouse game between cyber offense and defense leaves less-resourced groups -- and the right to privacy -- lagging.
We will confront questions like: Will national sovereignty reassert itself, breaking the internet, or will the vision of a borderless cyberspace prevail? Will the European approach set global standards, or simply aspire? How does the feminist vision of the internet apply to AI-generated spaces?
As a human rights lawyer engaged in digital issues for over 15 years, I will walk the class through the international human rights framework and how to apply it to key topics, from spyware and data protection, to net neutrality and internet shutdowns, platform governance, cybersecurity and generative AI.
To find the answers, we nimbly role-play, enjoy small group activities, welcome guest experts, and hone tech policy skills under time pressure. Expect to participate frequently, and to learn to navigate the most pressing issues facing companies, governments, and technologists today.
-
Instructor:
Peter Micek
Info - 3 points
Digital Content Provenance: Path to Tran
This course explores one of the most promising responses to the risks posed by Generative AI: digital content provenance. As AI-generated media grows more sophisticated and accessible, questions of transparency and authenticity have become central to the global informational ecosystem. Digital content provenance—an emerging open standard supported by thousands of organizations and recognized in recent policy actions such as the White House Executive Order on AI—offers a potential path to restoring trust in what we see and hear online.
Students will examine the technical foundations of provenance, including concepts such as public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificate authorities, and learn how provenance is being implemented across sectors including government, media, and technology. The course features guest speakers from industry and public service, providing insight into the policy, legal, and operational dimensions of this fast-evolving field.
Through research, writing, and the creation of an original provenance-enabled project, students will develop a strong understanding of how digital content provenance works and its relevance to future regulatory frameworks. This course is designed for those interested in the intersection of AI, digital media, global policy, and emerging technology standards.
-
Instructor:
Mounir E Ibrahim
Info - 1.5 points
Principles & Practice of Online Trust &
Online Trust & Safety
What rules and expectations should online platforms such as Google, Meta, X, OpenAI, TikTok, or Uber use to govern themselves? How do technology companies mitigate socio-technical harms stemming from their products? And how should they respond to evolving geopolitical conflicts playing out on their services? This course introduces the emerging field of Trust & Safety: the study of how online platforms are abused and how these systems can cause individual and societal harms, as well as the frameworks and tools used to prevent and mitigate those harms.
Still relatively obscure but increasingly central to public policy and technology governance, Trust & Safety now spans issues including content moderation, disinformation, child safety, algorithmic harm, and state-sponsored influence operations. Students will build foundational knowledge of the field through academic texts, practitioner case studies, and engagement with tools, taxonomies, and governance approaches used in industry. Course topics include detection systems, enforcement methods, moderation tradeoffs, transparency frameworks, red teaming, and regulatory perspectives such as the EU Digital Services Act. Case studies will examine harms across the technological stack, from social media to video games, dating apps, and AI models.
Students will also engage directly with the tensions and practicalities of operating, regulating, or covering these issues in a policy or product environment. The course prepares students to critically evaluate and help shape interventions aimed at digital safety across sectors.
- 3 points
Artificial Intelligence: A Survey for Po
AI for Policymakers
Updated course description: Artificial intelligence is not a purely technical field. Its roots lie in computer science, statistics, cognitive science, philosophy, linguistics, and other areas, and the policy questions are similarly varied. AI is at once a set of methods with a particular history and mathematical structure; a technology through which institutions make decisions about employment, finance, health, criminal justice, and more; and an international industry built on commercial incentives and physical infrastructure, including semiconductors, data centers, energy grids, and mineral supply chains. These dimensions are often treated separately, but many of the most consequential questions for policy arise where they meet.
This course examines AI from all these perspectives. It gives a basic foundation in computer science and machine learning, then uses concrete case studies to examine how technical choices interact with institutions, markets, law, and public policy. Topics may include government services, labor and workplace management, finance, healthcare, privacy, security, fairness, criminal justice, policing, immigration, facial recognition, and autonomous systems. The political economy of AI, including industrial concentration, compute, infrastructure, labor, trade, and the distribution of benefits and harms, serves as a throughline across the course.
The class is highly reading- and writing-intensive. One of its central goals is to train students to read contemporary research in artificial intelligence from a policy perspective, including work from computer science and adjacent technical fields. The instructor served as the first Director of AI for New York City and draws on that experience throughout. The course also includes guest speakers who work directly on significant AI and AI policy projects.
-
Instructor:
Neal P Parikh
Info - 3 points
Ethics of Media, Technology, and Design
Ethics-Media, Tech, and D
Each week we will examine a variety of case studies covering topics such as: the ethics of information design, algorithmic bias, deceptive user experience patterns, social media and commodification, safe spaces in virtual environments, the development of autonomous systems and smart cities, the relationships between artificial intelligence and copyright, democracy and media, and media activism and community organizing. Throughout the semester, students will select three ethical problems to research, including two case studies and one essay/ opinion piece. Using primary sources, photo, video, and graphics, students will capture pressing ethical issues. They will learn to navigate frameworks for ethical decision making, ethical management systems, and develop “codes” of ethics, and value statements. Students will also have the opportunity to engage in hands-on “ethical” user experience research during class exercises where they test websites, apps, and products. Finally, guests will be invited to the course to share their experience with developing ethical frameworks as media, design, and technology professionals.
-
Instructor:
Laura S Scherling
Info - 3 points
Digital Service Delivery for Leaders and
Digital Service for Polic
Radically different approaches to digital government are being pursued across the world, from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to the UK’s Government Digital Service. But one thing remains true: most public institutions are struggling to keep pace with technological change. This challenge is creating a crisis of confidence in large institutions and hampering the implementation of policies we need to move our world forward.
This course will study these varied approaches to digital government while equipping the next generation of leaders and public policy officials with tools to reform our institutions and deliver policy and digital services that improve outcomes, increase program efficiency, and delight the people that have to use them in the process.
No tech background? No problem. We will cover the fundamentals of digital service design and unpack important concepts like agile development, user-centered design, and iterative testing and learn how to incorporate them into policy work.
-
Instructor:
Haley Van Dyck
Info - 3 points
Evidence and Expertise in Science Policy
Evidence & Expertise Poli
This course examines the role of evidence and expertise in the development of science-informed public policy. Students explore how evidence is generated, evaluated, and translated into policy decisions, and how expert judgment shapes the interpretation of scientific findings under conditions of uncertainty. The course considers the scientific infrastructure behind evidence production, including questions of credibility, provenance, and reliability. Through practical and philosophical perspectives, students develop tools for assessing evidence, identifying relevant expertise, and communicating scientific knowledge to policymakers and the public. The course also examines the distinct roles of evidence and expertise in scientific, legal, and democratic decision-making, with particular attention to the challenges of uncertainty, competing interpretations, and governance in complex policy environments.
-
Instructor:
Stuart J Firestein
CULPA: 13 Wikipedia h-index: 50 Info - 3 points
Bad Science, Bad Policy: Improving Globa
Science, Pol & Global Hea
This course examines the relationship between scientific evidence and public policy through comparative case studies in global health. Focusing on both policy successes and failures, students explore how scientific evidence has been incorporated, ignored, distorted, or misused in decision-making across different political, historical, and institutional contexts. Through analysis of health crises, government responses, media coverage, and policy interventions, the course investigates the consequences of evidence-based and evidence-deficient policymaking. Case studies include contrasting approaches to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, such as HIV denialism in South Africa and Brazil’s evidence-informed prevention and treatment policies. Students assess the political and social factors that shaped these outcomes and consider how scientific expertise can be more effectively integrated into public policy. The course develops students' ability to critically evaluate policy decisions, understand the role of science in governance, and identify lessons for improving health policy and outcomes worldwide.
-
Instructor:
Natalia Pasternak Taschner
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
Biotechnology, Ethics and Society
Biotechnology, Ethics, So
This course examines the scientific foundations and public policy implications of genetics and biotechnology. Students explore how misconceptions about genetics have shaped public understanding, social attitudes, and policy debates, often resulting in deterministic views of human traits, identity, and behavior. Moving beyond traditional Mendelian models, the course introduces contemporary concepts in population genetics, human diversity, and genomic science to provide a more accurate understanding of how genes influence individuals and populations.
The course investigates the policy implications of genetic literacy in areas including race and ancestry, sex and gender, biotechnology, food systems, public health, and emerging genomic technologies. Students examine scientific and ethical debates surrounding genetic modification, CRISPR gene editing, genomic data privacy, and the regulation of biotechnology. Through case studies and policy analysis, the course develops students' ability to evaluate scientific evidence, assess competing claims about genetics and society, and engage thoughtfully with the governance challenges posed by advances in biotechnology and genomics.
-
Instructor:
Natalia Pasternak Taschner
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
Design for Social Innovation
Instructor permission required. Join the waitlist in Vergil to request registration.
This project-based course equips students with the tools of human-centered design to address real-world challenges in the social sector. Working in interdisciplinary teams, students act as “intrapreneurs,” designing solutions on behalf of nonprofit, government, and social enterprise clients. Through a structured 12-week innovation cycle, students move through four design phases:
Explore
(stakeholder research and mapping),
Reframe
(synthesis and insight development),
Generate
(ideation and concept creation), and
Prototype
(building and testing solutions).
Students develop key competencies in design thinking, project and client management, stakeholder interviewing, problem framing, prototyping, and storytelling. The course culminates in a final presentation and deliverables that include an implementation blueprint and pitch materials for client use.
Client organizations span sectors such as education, food systems, sustainability, and civic engagement. Class meetings include workshops, presentations, feedback sessions, and one-on-one team advising. Deliverables are team-based, and participation is evaluated through both class engagement and weekly reflections.
This course is designed for students seeking hands-on experience in social innovation and a creative, collaborative approach to systems-level change.
-
Instructor:
Sarah M Holloway
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
Scale Up Ventures: Growing a Business Ou
Scale-Up Ventures & Polic
This course explores the strategies, tools, and policy environments required to scale ventures beyond the startup phase, particularly in regions outside traditional tech hubs such as Silicon Valley. Students examine the entrepreneurial journey from early traction to sustained growth, considering both bottom-up approaches focused on talent, capital, and customer acquisition, and top-down approaches focused on policy and ecosystem design. Emphasis is placed on high-impact sectors including AI, blockchain, fintech, and edtech, as well as opportunities in underserved markets. Through guest lectures, written assignments, and a team-based final project, students gain practical insight into entrepreneurship, venture capital, and leadership strategies that support scale. The course is designed for students interested in launching ventures, supporting innovation ecosystems, or shaping policies that foster economic growth.
-
Instructor:
Fernando Fabre
Info - 3 points
Building & Scaling Social Impact Program
Build/Scale Social Impact
This course examines how public, private, and nonprofit organizations attempt to address complex social problems through programs, partnerships, and philanthropic investment. The first half explores historical and contemporary interventions across sectors, with attention to trade-offs, incentives, and consequences. Through case studies and critical readings, students analyze how trust, governance, and accountability shape outcomes. The second half focuses on the practice of designing and scaling social impact programs, emphasizing theory of change, evaluation, and strategic alignment. Assignments include strategy and fundraising memos, a final impact plan, and a presentation. This seminar equips students with analytical, writing, and communication skills relevant to leadership roles in the social impact field.
-
Instructor:
Thomas Ogletree
Info - 3 points
Storytelling and The Art of Creating Soc
Storytelling & Social Imp
-
Instructor:
Stephen Friedman
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
Impact Investing: Essential Skills
Impact Investing: Skills
This is an experiential course designed to introduce students to impact investing and provide them with the skills used by impact investors every day. Students will work on the key "products" required in an impact investment transaction including: sourcing a possible impact investment; pitching a potential investment; writing an investment memo with a full impact analysis; and creating and negotiating a term sheet for a possible impact investment. Through case studies, hands-on assignments, and team-based presentations, students will learn how to evaluate and structure impact investments. The course emphasizes applied tools used in the field and offers insight into pathways for careers in impact finance.
- 1.5 points
Social Value Investing: a Framework for
Cross-Sector Partnerships
Today’s leaders must confront increasingly complex challenges, from climate change to inequality, that demand innovative and collaborative approaches. This course introduces students to the Social Value Investing framework, a five-point management model developed at Columbia University to guide and evaluate cross-sector partnerships (CSPs). Drawing on decades of faculty research, students will examine how leaders across the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors have built effective alliances to address critical social and environmental problems.
Through a mix of theory, case studies, and applied tools, students will gain practical insights into the formation, governance, and performance measurement of CSPs. Emphasis will be placed on organizational design, leadership practices, and techniques for managing impact across sectoral boundaries. Weekly sessions will include lectures, group exercises, short videos, case-based discussions, and applied impact measurement activities.
Note: Students who have taken
Public Management Innovation
with Professors Buffett and Eimicke are not eligible to enroll.
- 3 points
Cost-Benefit Analysis
This course provides an applied introduction to cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a tool for evaluating public policies. Students will learn how to interpret and produce CBAs through lectures, problem sets, and real-world case studies focused on environmental, financial, agricultural, and transportation policies. Emphasis is placed on CBAs conducted by government agencies, including critical review of regulatory analyses and formulation of public comments.
Through individual and group assignments, students will gain hands-on experience constructing spreadsheet models, estimating impacts, applying discounting techniques, and performing sensitivity analyses. The course culminates in a student-led cost-benefit analysis project and the submission of formal comments on a government regulation.
Prerequisites:
SIPA IA6350 or SIPA IA6400 (Microeconomic Analysis) or equivalent. Familiarity with Excel is expected.
-
Instructor:
Jeffrey G Jr Shrader
Info - 3 points