Let's Talk About Digital Threats to Democracy

Series presented by the League of Women Voters of Maine in partnership with the Leagues of Women Voters of Alaska and Colorado

6 p.m. EDT // 5 p.m. CDT // 4 p.m. MDT // 3 p.m. PDT // 2 p.m. AKDT

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. Her newest book, Autocracy, Inc., published in 2024, gives an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them. Prior to that, her book, The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, explained why some of her contemporaries have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states.

Her previous books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History. Both books have appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major European languages. Both books were National Book Award finalists.

Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the LSE and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz. 

Suggested reading:

• There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing: How regime change happens in America, The Atlantic, February 13, 2025

• Europe’s Elon Musk Problem: He and other tech oligarchs are making it impossible to conduct free and fair elections anywhere, The Atlantic, January 27, 2025

About the series:

Disinformation. Conspiracy theories. Extremism. Surveillance. Our democracy is threatened as never before by toxic online content. The social media giants seem unable, or in some cases unwilling, to control the flood of lies and manipulative practices. The staggering — often hidden — reach of Big Tech into our lives endangers civil society, our civil rights, and our privacy. In a "post-truth" world we risk losing the shared understanding that underpins our democracy. 

Each month, LWV Maine explores a different facet of this crisis with guest experts. Join to learn, discuss, and work on possible solutions.