A quarter of the world’s population—about 2 billion people—are expected to head to the polls by the end of 2024. And while those elections will take place in countries like the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and the U.K., there is one place all those debates will play out—the internet. Northeastern University’s London campus will host a conference on May 10 that will bring together digital household names, including Facebook owner Meta and search engine giant Google, with U.K. and U.S. regulators and leading academics. Organized by Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative, the “Internet and Society: The Trans-Atlantic Research Future” conference will focus on the role of the internet in structuring democracy, society and markets.
Speakers will include Melanie Dawes, chief executive of the U.K.’s communications watchdog Ofcom, and Janet Haven, an adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden on artificial intelligence, as well as Northeastern professors David Lazer and Brian Ball. John Wihbey, an associate professor of media and technology at Northeastern and co-leader of the Internet Democracy Initiative, said 2024’s accumulation of elections was a catalyst for the conference.
