Alumni-Faculty Forum: Free Speech: Navigating the Gray Areas of Disinformation in the Digital Age

Location: Alexander Hall, Richardson Auditorium

Moderator:

Andrew Guess
Class of 1934 University Preceptor and Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Princeton University

Panelists:

George Harmon ’63
Associate Professor Emeritus, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

John G. H. Oakes ’83
Writer; Publisher, The Evergreen Review 

Myesha Jemison ’18
PhD Candidate, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge

Moderator

Andrew Guess
Andy Guess’ research on social media and politics has investigated the extent to which online Americans’ news habits are polarized (the popular “echo chambers” hypothesis), patterns in the consumption and spread of online misinformation, and the effectiveness of efforts to counteract misperceptions originating online. He is affiliated faculty at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. His research has been supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation and published in peer-reviewed journals such as Science Advances, Nature Human Behaviour, Political Analysis and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Guess came to Princeton in 2017.

Panelists

George Harmon ’63
George Harmon was a full-time faculty member at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for 28 years and part-time for nine years. He specialized in reporting and writing and served 15 years as news department chair. He also was chairman of the company publishing the student newspaper and academic chair of the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps. Harmon began as a nightside reporter at the Chicago Daily News, covering police news and street riots. Subsequently he was city editor, business editor and assistant managing editor/features, business editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, and publisher/editor of the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. He is in the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame and currently is a director of Paddock Publications. As a consultant, he trained more than 1,500 executives in communications skills and nearly 1,000 working journalists. He has an MBA from Loyola University Chicago and was a Navy officer on coastal patrol during the Vietnam War.

John G.H. Oakes ’83
John Oakes’s professional life has always revolved around writing: first in journalism, then as a book editor, publisher and teacher of publishing. He started his career as a reporter for the Associated Press. Since 2015 he has been publisher of the online literary magazine, The Evergreen Review. He is also editor-at-large for OR Books, an independent press he co-founded in 2009. He has long been involved in independent publishing, helping to run publishing companies as editor and publisher, and has edited or published well over 600 books. His first book, “The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy and Promise of Doing Without,” is scheduled to be published by Avid Reader Press (Simon and Schuster) in 2024. In 1983, in his senior year at Princeton, he started The Progressive Review, which later morphed into what is now known as The Prog.

Myesha Jemison ’18
Myesha Jemison is a researcher, writer and creative based in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge scholar. Her doctoral research examines Cambridge Analytica’s use of misinformation and disinformation, data mining and surveillance in presidential elections in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Mauritius. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a masters from Columbia University, where she was a Gates Millennium scholar. At Princeton, she was elected student body president and Young Alumni Trustee. Broadly, Myesha’s interests center on intersections between technology and inequity, Indigenous knowledge and power, cultural understanding and learning, and Black and Indigenous imaginations of future. She spends her ‘spare time’ highlighting Black and Indigenous histories via Scholourship.com, traveling internationally (43 countries so far), coding and eating seasoned vegan food.