I was checking out TED talks for something interesting and clicked on
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci TED | Published on Nov 17, 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.I found her talk to the point, fascinating and quite informative. I was impressed enough to look for more about her and found this.
Fall 2017 Donoho Colloquium - Zeynep Tufekci: Democracy vs. Clickbait Dartmouth Published on Jan 16, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIfgq5N5PY4 The Neukom Institute at Dartmouth presents the Fall 2017 Donoho Colloquium - Zeynep Tufekci: Democracy vs. Clickbait Lies! Conspiracy! Machine Learning! Profit. Without the traditional gatekeepers of information, helping distinguish truth from rumor, we are left exposed to a global, internet based, automated, money-driven and sometimes politically motivated misinformation in our news landscape that lives and dies on click-driven, outrageous, conspiracy theory and inflammatory language. We don’t just need more fact-checkers. We need to fix the underlying dynamics. American writer, academic, and self-styled "techno-sociologist", Zeynep Tufekci, writes primarily about the effect of technology on politics and society. She is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Massachusetts. She is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and her first book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protests was published by Yale University Press. Recorded October 25, 2017Facts is what we need and facts is what she offers. It starts with the usual speaker intro, then she spends a bit of time reviewing her life and past work, at about 28:20 she gets to her 2012 OpEd in the NewYorkTimes
28:45 ... in it I argued that the Obama campaign's success and digital technologies should actually be a warning sign and I argued that sort of this kind of dark posts on Facebook that nobody else sees kind of targeting people with massive data on them and privatizing the public sphere so that it's no longer something that all of us can see ... 29:42 argued for having public depositories of political messaging so that stuff doesn't happen in the dark without us seeing and that we and the sort of we and people should have a sense of what the campaign knows about them and how they're being targetedand the backlash, attacks on her. If we are going to save pluralism and democratic liberalism, we need to understand what we are up against. This is no time for avoidance or complacency. Zeynep Tufekci does an excellent job of delineated one facet of what an informed and engaged electorate would want to know about.