The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

While we may all be experiencing some Census fatigue given the attention the Census has been accorded over the last year, the Bureau is already hard at work on next decade’s Census. The Biden administration has demonstrated interest in including new language on gender and sexual identity. That would generate the most comprehensive data set ever about the LGBTQ+ population in the United States. Peo...

Hansi Lo Wang didn’t mince words in sharing how the pandemic upended the 2020 Census much like it upended everything else. In person counting (AKA doorknocking) is the Bureau’s main way of reaching undercounted populations, but this year got off to a later start plus people were likely more reluctant to answer their doors in the midst of lockdown. Many households may have been missed. Further, the...

It’s interesting how an inherently personal decision--what box you’re going to check--gets quantified into something far more rigid when it comes to the Census. This is tricky because, as Hansi underscored, racial and ethnic labels shift over time--for ex, who identifies and is identified as White. The Census Bureau has conducted research that shows that some people identify themselves in one raci...

Many of us are wondering what changes in demographics will be demonstrated by the 2020 Census. Hansi Lo Wang underscored that we don’t have Census results yet, but based on existing trends, we can expect to see a U.S. population that is getting older, that Gen Z and millennials are becoming a bigger share of the workforce which has major implications for what the country will look like. Further, t...

Madeline asked Census Reporter Hansi Lo Wang a question that may be on many of our minds: why should teens care about the Census? Firstly, Hansi noted that many teens may ALREADY be filling out the Census if, for example, they are the strongest English speaker in the house. Beyond that, he noted that teens should be concerned for the same reason ALL Americans should be concerned: this is a fundame...

You may recall that former President Trump wanted to add a kind of citizenship question that had never been included on every census form. As such, the Census Bureau conducted research in advance of 2020 to test out the anticipated impact of a citizenship question. It sent out a form that looked like the Census, half of which had a citizenship question and half of which didn’t. The Bureau found th...

Our podcast guest Hansi Lo Wang emphasized that trying to “force” people to respond to the Census--for ex, through a door knocker--may not provide the best and most accurate information because people can be stressed, rushed, or disinvested in full disclosure. We have to have people WANT to participate. That is predicated on having the public’s trust. Unfortunately, Public perception is a delicate...

There is a long and thorny history of who has been counted in the U.S. Census and how the count was conducted--a legacy that continues to have reverberations today. For reasons known and unknown, people of color, renters, and rural residents are just some of the groups who have been undercounted decade after decade. As a result, the data that we have about certain population groups based on Census...

Our podcast guest Hansi Lo Wang underscored that there has never been a perfect Census--there have always been historically undercounted groups. This emerged from our Constitution itself, which stated that an enslaved person should be counted as ⅗ of a free person (!) and specified the exclusion of Native Americans who were not taxed. Thankfully, this changed through the passage of the 14th Amendm...

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Madeline and Olivia spoke with Hansi Lo Wang , national correspondent for NPR based in New York City who reports on the people, power, and money behind the 2020 census. The Census is one of the most consequential things the government does every decade, yet few of us deeply understand its operations and implications in the way Hansi does.  The U.S. governmen...

Our podcast guest Aviv Ovadya reminded us that entertainment is where we gain our sense of what it means to be a person and thereby has a HUGE influence on us. There are so many opportunities for unethical behavior. Social media platforms are used by everyone, and thereby can be a very POSITIVE force, across demographics and generations, if they are structured to bring out ethical behavior (althou...

We loved Bernie Sanders recent interview with Ezra Klein, and his response to a question about how a guy as old as him garnered so much support from young voters. His secret? He loves young people, treats us with respect, and talks about real issues to us. Bernie underscored that young people are the most progressive generation our country has ever had: we are firmly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti...

Our guest Aviv Ovadya shared his fondness for a methodology popularized by Michael Caulfield with the acronym SIFT--Stop and take stock, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace the claims, quotes, and media to find the original coverage. What’s exciting is that this can actually be done pretty quickly (albeit a bit slower and more of a pain on your phone.) Ideally platforms themselves...

Navigating the complex world of social media can be hard, especially during these polarizing and inflammatory times we find ourselves in. When it comes to facing adverse or defining circumstances, it’s always better to traverse them with like-minded individuals who are ready to give support to one another. In our recent Round Table episode, we spoke with Aviv Ovadya and Robin Ehrlich of The Though...

Our podcast guest Robin Erlich of The Thoughtful Technology Project reminded us that a big part of media literacy is emotional literacy--that is, how do we as individuals respond to the very emotionally intense news that swirls around us and our friends’ reactions to them? The murder of eight people in Atlanta, six of them women of Asian descent, last week, and the trial of Derek Chauvin, the offi...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with Aviv Ovadya and Robin Ehrlich of The Thoughtful Technology Project . The Thoughtful Technology Program focuses on ensuring that our information ecosystem has a positive impact on society—that it can facilitate the understanding, trust, and problem solving needed for a well-functioning civilization. They underscored that being given...

Of the many projects Macon Phillips worked on while in DC, there were two he’s particularly proud of. One was the White House petitions platform, premised on the idea that if a lot of people are excited about something, White House leadership should probably know about it and be able to respond directly. The administration received petitions on everything from online poker to building a new Death...

Madeline was curious to know more about the specifics of the tech work our guest Morgan Phillips did in the Obama White House. The first thing he did when he arrived in early 2009 was (surprise!) redesign the White House website and think about what specifically the administration wanted it to communicate to people. Macon noted that at the time, it was challenging to get access to computer systems...

Our guest Macon Phillips noted, unsurprisingly given his tenure in the Obama White House, that he gets asked a lot about Barack Obama’s “secret sauce” for using technology so effectively. The secret is that there wasn’t really a secret as much as an underlying ethic about wanting to really understand a community. After Obama graduated from college, he spent time as a grassroots organizer on the So...

Our guest Macon Phillips shared that while never studied or planned to work on government, he found himself working on the tech team for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and ultimately going to the White House with him to try to translate the tools that had been so successful in the campaign into effective governance. Macon noted that they thought about their work in three different areas when they en...

At this week's Round Table, s part of our series on creating healthy discourse online, Divya, Inica, and Madeline spoke with Macon Phillips , founder of Starling Strategies. Macon headed President Obama’s White House’s digital strategy during Obama’s first term after playing a central role in the 2008 presidential campaign’s pioneering use of new media and technology to mobilize supporters. Much o...

Cathy underscored the importance of keeping safe space for dissent, and for representation by lots of different voices. Members of the Swedish counter-speech group I Am Here talk about how when they used to go online, they felt like all the comments they would see were toxic. It made them feel like, “is this my country? Am I the only one who feels this way?” because they didn’t see their viewpoint...

How do we keep collective action from turning into countering hate speech with hate speech? There’s an international group, hubbed in Sweden, called I Am Here. They have very firm rules about how to engage in counter speech. They require members to not espouse hate speech, not spread rumors, and to not even correct someone’s grammar (I mean, we all know that can get pretty heated!) They try to set...

In an era dominated by social media and its unique ability to provide a voice for all perspectives and ideologies, platforms and their users have a responsibility to promote an environment characterized by free speech in a ‘controlled’ environment. In this week’s podcast with Cathy Buerger of the Dangerous Speech Project she depicted that it is increasingly difficult for the government to step in...

Hate speech has many different definitions in different contexts, which is part of why The Dangerous Speech project has chosen a slightly different term. Countries that have laws against incitement don’t necessarily define hate speech in the same way that social media companies do. Our guest Cathy Buerger underscored that one person’s free speech can be another person’s hate speech, and one person...