Truth, Disrupted
New Harvard Business Review series expands on Sinan Aral’s false news research
“Truth Disrupted,” Sinan Aral’s latest take on #FakeNews, is on the July 17 cover of @HarvardBiz. In it, the MIT IDE co-lead, discusses “the future and potential consequences of fake news and how we might stop it. It’s a tricky problem, so ideas and discussion arealways, greatly appreciated,” he says.
Aral and his research team have studied the topic for the past three years, but say that “in all likelihood, the problem will get worse before it gets better, because the technology for manipulating video and audio is improving, making distortions of reality more convincing and more difficult to detect…to date, virtually no safeguards exist when it comes to truth and falsity online.”
“The good news, though, is that researchers, AI experts, and social media platforms themselves are taking the issue seriously and digging into both the nature of the problem and potential solutions.”
The new series will examine “how we might contain the spread of falsity. A successful fight will require four interrelated approaches — educating the players, changing their incentives, improving technological tools, and (the right amount of) governmental oversight — and the answers to five key questions:
- How can we educate people to spot and resist falsity?
- How can we disincentivize the spread of falsity and incentivize the spread of good-faith communication and truth?
- How can technological tools — algorithms in particular — be used to contain false information?
- How can regulators usefully weigh in without destroying the economic and social value created by social media?
- And, perhaps most important, Who gets to decide what’s true and what’s false?
Read the article here and watch for the full digital series throughout the month.
