Moderated by:
Ed Williams – President and CEO of Edelman EMEA. Prior to that he led Edelman UK and Ireland for eight years. Previously, he oversaw corporate affairs and communications for two global media companies: the BBC and Reuters. He advises senior executives on corporate communications and strategy and serves on a number of boards, including the Royal College of Art, the Woolf Institute in Cambridge and International Crisis Group’s Advisory Council. He has an Honorary Fellowship from Goldsmiths University and is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s AMP programme. He started his career in newspaper and television journalism. Ed is Chairman of Aspen UK.
On the panel:
Arisha Michelle Hatch – Vice President and Chief of Campaigns at Color Of Change. Arisha leads campaigns on civic engagement, voting rights, criminal justice, and corporate and media accountability. She is a leader and innovator in the racial justice movement, leading culture change work that has called out crime TV shows for normalizing injustice in policing since 2013. Since joining Color Of Change in 2012, Arisha has ushered in some groundbreaking victories for Black communities: getting payment processors like Mastercard and PayPal to ban use of their platforms by white supremacists, persuading Saturday Night Live to add two Black women to its cast and writer’s room mid-season and getting COPS and Live PD cancelled for their unjust portrayal of the criminal justice system. Arisha has degrees in economics, creative writing and feminist studies from Stanford University and she received her doctorate in law from Santa Clara University.
Sasha Havlicek – Founding CEO of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Sasha has spearheaded ISD’s pioneering research and data analysis of disinformation, hate and extremism, as well as ISD’s policy advisory, frontline training, digital education, tech and communications programmes to operatively push back on the forces threatening democracy and the cohesion of society at large. With a background in conflict resolution and an expertise in global extremist movements, digital information operations and electoral interference, she has advised a range of governments at the highest levels and spearheaded partnerships with the UN, EU Commission and Global Counter-Terrorism Forum. She has also worked with the private and civil society sectors to innovate real-world solutions to the rising challenges of polarisation, extremism and hate, including major programmes run in partnership with Google, FB and Microsoft. Sasha serves as an expert advisor to the UK Counter-Extremism Commission and the Mayor of London’s counter-extremism programme, and is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Sasha previously served as Senior Director at the EastWest Institute where she led conflict resolution programming. Sasha has testified before US Congress, the UK Parliament and is a regular commentator in the media (CNN, BBC, Channel 4 News and other networks).
Peter Pomerantsev – Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Co-Director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital era disinformation and polarisation. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. His latest book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019 and has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize and was a Times Book of the Year. Peter has testified on the challenges of information war and media development to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defence Select Committee. He was a specialist advisor on the ‘UK Parliamentary Committee on Fake News’, and was a member of USC Annenberg’s ‘Transatlantic Working Group on Internet Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression’. Peter writes for publications including the NY Times, Granta, The Atlantic and American Interest, and is frequently asked to host policy seminars at NATO, the EU, the UK FCO, German Foreign Office, and US State Department.
Ethan Zuckerman – Director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. Ethan is also associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2020) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts.