The Future of Online Platforms with CT Professor Mor Naaman and Former CEO NPR, VP News NBC Vivian Schiller

The Cornell Tech Alumni Council is excited to have partnered with the Cornell Club of NYC to present this month’s After Hours featuring Cornell Tech Professor Mor Naaman and Editor in Chief of Weber Shandwick Vivian Schiller.

Mor kicked off the night with an overview of signaling theory and trustworthiness on online platforms. The energetic discussion centered on the topics of fake news and data privacy in social media. Over the course of the evening, Mor and Vivian challenged the audience on the issues of roles and responsibilities of government and media as well as platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the individuals that are using these platforms.

Questions arose regarding regulation in data privacy vs. data truth, evolving definitions of facts vs. opinions, and the impact and approaches of dark social on targeting.

Mor and Vivian also announced their own program launched this year to help defend individual media and print journalism. The program, called Tech, Media, and Democracy, is a collaboration across NYC schools Cornell Tech, Columbia University, City University of New York, New York University, and the New School that aims to address challenges in design and engineering in the creation and spread of fake news.

The ask left for the audience was to be vigilant in understanding and reviewing their own data privacy agreements.

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Mor Naaman is an associate professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech, where he is the founder of the Connective Media hub, leads a research group focused on social technologies, and directs the Oath-supported Connected Experiences laboratory. Mor applies multidisciplinary methods to 1) gain a better understanding of people and their use of social tech; 2) extract insights about people, technology and society from social media and other sources of social data, and 3) develop new social technologies as well as novel tools to make social data more accessible and usable in various settings.

Vivian Schiller is Editor in Chief at Weber Shandwick. She is also the former president and CEO of National Public Radio, former head of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter, and former senior vice president and chief digital officer for NBC News, including oversight of NBCNews.com. Vivian is a proud Cornell alum, class of ‘83.

[May 2018, Cornell Club]

After Hours is a Cornell Tech alumni run event where we host industry leaders at the coolest NYC (and as of recently, SF) venues we can find.

Interested in speaking? Know of a great space to host? Kind enough to sponsor an event? 🙏