Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Follow Us:
Top Stories

Video: Battling the effects of conspiracy theories and disinformation

Panel: Battling the Effects of Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation

This week, we are excited to share a video series featuring panel discussions from the Global Democracy Champions Summit co-hosted by Keseb and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. We hope this series will spur dialogue and action to advance inclusive democracy in the US and globally.

Communities across the world are battling the effects of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Today’s featured panel discussion highlights examples of innovations to mitigate these effects, discusses the implications of disinformation for upcoming elections, and surfaces ideas for immediate and long-term solutions, both in the US and globally.


Moderator: Yascha Mounk, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Panelists:

●Tareq Alani, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, PushBlack

●Samar Ali, Founding President and CEO, Million of Conversations

●Ian Bassin, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Protect Democracy

●Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University; Co-Director of Arena Initiative

Check out the discussion: Battling the Effects of Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation

We will share one panel discussion from the Summit each day of this week. Come back tomorrow to view “Building Enduring People Power.”

Please visit Keseb and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University to subscribe and receive news of future Democracy Champions opportunities.


Read More

Keeping Kids Safe Online?: Understanding the Debate Over AI Age Verification
boy in gray shirt using black laptop computer
Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Keeping Kids Safe Online?: Understanding the Debate Over AI Age Verification

This nonpartisan policy brief, written by an ACE fellow, is republished by The Fulcrum as part of our partnership with the Alliance for Civic Engagement and our NextGen initiative — elevating student voices, strengthening civic education, and helping readers better understand democracy and public policy.

Key Takeaways

Keep ReadingShow less
Global leaders sitting around a circular table at the G7 Summit on June 18, 2026.

G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners and global tech CEOs attend a working lunch on innovation and AI at the G7 Summit on June 17, 2026 in Evian-les-Bains, France.

Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

At G7 Meeting, AI Titans Showed Themselves to Be the World’s New “Power Elite”

Seventy years ago, in 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published a startling exposé of the hidden forces controlling the government in the United States. What Mills labeled “the power elite” occupied leading roles in corporations, the military, and political institutions.

Mills’ book was designed to explore the shadowy world in which the power elite operated and to expose the enormous behind-the-scenes influence of a group whose decisions had great consequences for “the underlying populations of the world.” At the time it appeared, commentators credited Mills with “developing a theory of where the decisive power lies in American society, how it got there, and how it is exercised.”

Keep ReadingShow less
The U.S. Pentagon.

Buried in the 2027 NDAA, Section 224 could fundamentally reshape U.S.-Israel defense ties. Is Congress creating an irreversible military partnership?

Getty Images, Westend61

America Should Stay Single

As we wait to see what comes of ceasefire negotiations between the United States and Iran, the House just released its 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Buried within it lies Section 224, titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” a provision representing what would be a radical departure from how we work with even our strongest allies, turning America’s relationship with a close collaborator into a permanent military-industrial integration. The U.S. has worked with NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains in the past, but never like this. Many are calling it a merger. We should all be calling it off.

Section 224 could inextricably link the fate of our country’s defense to another’s. The Secretary of Defense would be directed to designate an executive agent to fuse ventures with Israel so significantly that it would touch almost every area of defense tech: AI, autonomous systems, energy, cyber, biotech, and beyond. It also proposes “network” and “data fusion,” which means, as the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute warned, “the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.America First may soon sound more like a sarcastic punchline than a platform.

Keep ReadingShow less
AI Could Save Thousands—So Why Is Healthcare Still Hitting the Brakes?

Discover how generative AI in healthcare could reduce misdiagnoses, improve chronic disease management, and save hundreds of thousands of lives—if policymakers accelerate adoption instead of waiting for risk-free perfection.

Getty Images / Pakorn Supajitsoontorn

AI Could Save Thousands—So Why Is Healthcare Still Hitting the Brakes?

Imagine that the only way Americans traveled was on foot or on horseback. And assume that 100,000 people died each year because they couldn’t reach a hospital in time or firefighters arrived too late.

Suddenly, they learned that thanks to a technological breakthrough, cars and trucks will become widely available within three years.

Keep ReadingShow less