He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse. By Charlie Warzel
Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable - to propaganda, to misin-formation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments - so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. But it’s what he sees coming next that will really scare the shit out of you.
In mid - 2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.”
In mid - 2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.”
The web and the
information ecosystem that had developed around it was wildly unhealthy, Ovadya
argued. The incentives that governed its biggest platforms were calibrated to
reward information that was often misleading and polarizing, or both. Platforms
like Facebook, Twitter, and Google prioritized clicks, shares, ads, and money
over quality of information, and Ovadya couldn’t shake the feeling that it was
all building toward something bad — a kind of critical threshold of addictive
and toxic misinformation. The presentation was largely ignored by employees
from the Big Tech platforms — including a few from Facebook who would later go
on to drive the company’s NewsFeed integrity effort.
“At the time, it felt
like we were in a car careening out of control and it wasn’t just that everyone
was saying, ‘we’ll be fine’ - it’s that they didn't even see the car,” he said. Ovadya saw early what
many - including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs - wouldn’t grasp
until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is
vulnerable - to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising
from foreign governments - so much so that it threatens to undermine a
cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. But it’s what he sees
coming next that will really scare the shit out of you.
“Alarmism can be good - you should be alarmist about this stuff,” Ovadya said one January afternoon
before calmly outlining a deeply unsettling projection about the next two
decades of fake news, artificial intelligence–assisted misinformation
campaigns, and propaganda. “We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can
imagine,” he said. “We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we're
even more screwed now. And depending how far you look into the future it just
gets worse.” That future, according
to Ovadya, will arrive with a slew of slick, easy - to - use, and eventually
seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying
reality, for which terms have already been coined - “reality apathy,”
“automated laser phishing,” and "human puppets."
Which is why Ovadya, an MIT grad with engineering
stints at tech companies like Quora, dropped everything in early 2016 to
try to prevent what he saw as a Big Tech–enabled information crisis. “One day
something just clicked,” he said of his awakening. It became clear to him that,
if somebody were to exploit our attention economy and use the platforms that
undergird it to distort the truth, there were no real checks and balances to
stop it. “I realized if these systems were going to go out of control, there’d
be nothing to reign them in and it was going to get bad, and quick,” he said.
Today Ovadya and a
cohort of loosely affiliated researchers and academics are anxiously looking
ahead toward a future that is alarmingly dystopian. They’re running war
game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun to pop up
and the outcomes are typically disheartening.
For Ovadya - now the
chief technologist for the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Media Responsibility
and a Knight News innovation fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at
Columbia - the shock and ongoing anxiety over Russian Facebook ads and Twitter
bots pales in comparison to the greater threat: Technologies that can be used
to enhance and distort what is real are evolving faster than our ability to
understand and control or mitigate it. The stakes are high and the possible
consequences more disastrous than foreign meddling in an election - an
undermining or upending of core civilizational institutions, an
"infocalypse.” And Ovadya says that this one is just as plausible as the
last one - and worse... read more:
