Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: Marietje Schaake: Can democracy survive in a digital world? A former Member of the European Parliament sizes up the state of democracy in the digital age and finds much to fret about, but also ways to fight back. Marietje Schaake was a Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019 and now serves as the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. As she has watched democracy evolve in the age of instantaneous global communication and hyperconnected social media, she has grown concerned about the resilience of democracy as technology disrupts the status quo. While the technologies—and the often-unregulated companies who created them—claim to be well-meaning, she says democracy is under attack from propagandists and bad actors using these transformative tools in troubling ways. The business models based on surveillance and advertisi