The Barbra Streisand Annual Lecture 2023


The UCLA Barbra Streisand Center
invites you to the inaugural public lecture
on the topic of
Truth in the Public Sphere

 

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture and Black cybercultures; his scholarship examines race in social media, video games, blogs, and other digital media. His book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, (NYU Press 2020), the 2021 winner of the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies and the 2021 Nancy Baym Book Award, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.
Born in Iowa City, Iowa, Frances is the daughter of two professors and grew up attending the Iowa caucuses with her parents, instilling a strong sense of pride in democracy and responsibility for civic participation. Frances holds a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College and an MBA from Harvard. She is a specialist in algorithmic product management, having worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, Yelp and Facebook. She was recruited to Facebook to be the lead Product Manager on the Civic Misinformation team, which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later also worked on counter-espionage. During her time at Facebook, Frances became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety and putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook. Frances fundamentally believes that the problems we are facing today with social media are solvable. We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity.
Stuart Stevens is a Senior Advisor to the Lincoln Project. He is the author of eight books, including the New York Times bestseller It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (2020), and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation’s toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA where she serves as the Interim Director of the UCLA DataX Initiative and Founder and Director of the Center on Race and Digital Justice at UCLA. She is the author of the best-selling book, Algorithms of Oppression , and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the “Genius Award”) for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
4:30 p.m. Doors Open
5:00 p.m. Lecture
UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, The Centennial Terrace

The Barbra Streisand Center was established in 2021 and made possible by the vision and generosity of Barbra Streisand. The Streisand Center will become the future Barbra Streisand Institute at UCLA, a forward-thinking institute dedicated to finding solutions to the most vital social issues.

The Center for Truth in the Public Sphere will be the first area of study and advocacy and will focus on truth in the public sphere, which Streisand is especially passionate about. Speakers and research will delve into urgent and existential threats to democracy, and examine how lies and the proliferation of disinformation can destroy a civic sense of decency, as well as entire countries.

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