Democratic

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain More than half of the 60 countries holding national elections this year are experiencing a democratic decline, risking the integrity of the electoral process, as reported in the latest Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. The worsening election quality is concerning, given the pivotal role elections play in either reinforcing or mitigating the trend of…

The chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee said on Monday he is concerned about the decision by the campaign of president Joe Biden to join short-video app TikTok, while the White House said nothing has changed about government national security concerns.Democratic senator Mark Warner said he was concerned about the national security implications of Chinese-owned TikTok and the Biden campaign decision to join.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of…

A Democratic lawmaker said that artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes are a bipartisan issue in the wake of reports of the recent spread of AI-generated graphic images of pop superstar Taylor Swift on social media. “What’s happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new,” Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) said Thursday in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “For yrs, women have been targets of deepfakes w/o their consent. And w/ advancements in AI, creating deepfakes is easier & cheaper.” “This is…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Democratic backsliding is occurring in an unprecedented number of wealthy countries once thought immune to such forces—the United States among them, finds a new analysis led by Cornell political scientists and published in World Politics. To inform debates about where backsliding is happening—and to highlight…

Artificial intelligence lab OpenAI is forming a new team to create democratic processes to shape how its AI software should be governed to address bias and other factors, the Microsoft-backed company said in a blog post on Tuesday.The "Collective Alignment" team is a continuation of the work of a grant program for funding democratic process experiments that was announced in May 2023, the San Francisco-based firm said. The program wrapped up recently. We are now on WhatsApp. Click to join. "As we continue to pursue our…

If 2022 was the year mpox infections exploded globally, 2023 was the year much of the world stopped paying attention.Yet Canadian researchers, in collaboration with scientists working on the ground in hot spots such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are still shining a spotlight on the virus that sparked last year's unprecedented global outbreak — and one that still seems capable of new surprises. One joint Canadian-DRC research team, co-led by Jason Kindrachuk from the University of Manitoba, has…

SACRAMENTO —  A protest by about 1,000 people angry over U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas entered the convention center where the California Democratic Party was meeting Saturday evening, causing security guards to lock entrances to the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in downtown Sacramento and prompting an early end to the day’s official events.Delegates and other participants were temporarily blocked from exiting and entering the building after demonstrators barged through security around 6 p.m. and…

Difference in average proportion of moral foundation use between Democratic and Republican primary candidates on Twitter. Left plot compares 2016 Republican candidates and 2016 Democratic candidates; right plot compares 2016 Republican candidates and 2020 Democratic candidates. Credit: PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad189 New research from Professor Manos Tsakiris, from the Department of Psychology reveals how…

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders on Monday agreed to a $310.8-billion budget spending plan that will reduce investments in fighting climate change and reflects a compromise on the governor’s last-minute proposal to speed up infrastructure projects across California. The 2023-24 budget deal, which lawmakers will vote on in a series of bills this week, ends weeks of infighting among Democrats that began after the governor introduced a package of infrastructure bills into the tail end of the budget…

The Democratic Party of Oregon said Friday it will send a half-million dollars to the US Marshals Service that had been donated by a former executive at the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange FTX, to conform with a request from the US Department of Justice.Oregon elections officials had already fined the Democratic Party of Oregon $15,000 for wrongly reporting the source of the campaign donation last year. Oregon Senate Republicans had demanded that state Democrats send back the $500,000 campaign donation.The Democratic…