Facebook is the largest social media company in the world, yet reporting and research shows it fails to protect users from myriad harms, from rampant hate speech to misinformation and human trafficking. Regulators, former employees and civil society are alarmed by the company’s behavior, calling for more scrutiny to protect users. Join Dr. Latanya Sweeney, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at HKS, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz, and third-year Harvard Law School student Dylan Moses for a conversation around Jeff’s new book, “Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets”.

Latanya Sweeney is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, director and founder of the Public Interest Tech Lab, Editor-in-Chief of Technology Science, director and founder of the Data Privacy Lab, former Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Latanya Sweeney has 3 patents, more than 100 academic publications, pioneered the field known as data privacy, launched the emerging area known as algorithmic fairness, and was first to present technology challenges in U.S. elections. Her work is explicitly cited in two U.S. regulations, including the U.S. federal medical privacy regulation (known as HIPAA).  She is a recipient of the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Privacy Award, the American Psychiatric Association’s Privacy Advocacy Award, an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and has testified before government bodies worldwide. She earned her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2001, being the first black woman to do so, and her undergraduate degree in computer science from Harvard University. Dr. Sweeney creates and uses technology to assess and solve societal, political and governance problems, and teaches others how to do the same. Her most recent work is on technology tools to strengthen elections, analyses of social media platforms, and new real-world privacy paradigms. Dr. Sweeney is also helping to pioneer a new field known as public interest technology.

Jeff Horwitz is a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal in San Francisco, and a former reporter for the Associated Press, American Banker, Legal Times, The San Bernardino Sun and The Washington City Paper. He was a Knight Bagehot fellow at Columbia University, and has won Loeb and Polk awards, as well as the Christopher J Welles Memorial Prize and the New York Press Club’s Gold Keyboard. He lives in Oakland with his wife.

Dylan Moses is a third-year law student at Harvard Law School where he is an editor on both the Harvard Law Review as well as the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and a Research Assistant at Berkman Klein’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media. As a Graduate Student Fellow, Dylan’s work focuses on internet-powered technologies and their relationship to speech, privacy, and property. Prior to Harvard, Dylan spent time working on the social and technical sides of the internet. As a Trust & Safety practitioner, Dylan held several roles in content policy and operations at Facebook and YouTube, mitigating the risks of online hate speech, terrorism, and misinformation. He is a founding fellow with the Integrity Institute, where he advised regulators on several policy frameworks for governing social media platforms, both in the United States and abroad. He was also a fellow in Berkman Klein’s inaugural Assembly: Disinformation Program, where he helped plan counter-disinformation strategies ahead of the 2020 U.S. Elections with leaders in tech policy, government, and academia. Dylan received his BA from Johns Hopkins University in International Studies and Political Theory.