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They advocate AI as a replacement for h...
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At Google, Tristan saw that users effectively served artificial intelligence, rather than the other way around.
At Google, Tristan’s principal ally was an engineer named Joe Edelman. From their collaboration grew a website and movement called Time Well Spent, which they launched in 2013.
Time Well Spent
offered advice on managing time in a world filled with distractions, while also advocating for human-centered design. It grew steadily to sixty thousand members, many of whom were technology-industry people troubled by attention...
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but it struggled to effe...
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Tristan gave a well-received presentation about how internet platforms on smartphones hacked the brains of their users.
He described the public health consequences of brain hacking as a loss of
personal agency, a loss o...
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Tristan’s 60 Minutes segment aired on April
9, 2017. Three days later, we joined forces.
we realized we knew only a few people we could contact, all in technology and media. We had no relationships in government.
What we got instead was
polite interest but little in the way of follow-up.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a person to embrace an idea when his or her net worth depends on not embracing it.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow. —MARGARET ATWOOD
There is a popular misconception that regulation does not work with technology. The argument consists of a set of flawed premises: (1) regulation cannot keep pace with rapidly evolving technology, (2) government intervention always harms innovation, (3) regulators
can never understand tech well enough to provide oversight, and (4) the market will always allocate resources best. The source of the misconception is a very effective lobbying campaign, led by Google, with an assist from Facebook.
Prior to 2008, the tech industry maintained an especially low profile in Washington. All of that changed when Google, led by chairman Eric Schmidt, played a major role in Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, as did Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes. Obama’s win led to a revolving ...
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the flow in both di...
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Tech companies supported
politicians with campaign contributions and technology in exchange for being left alone. The enormous popularity of tech companies with voters made the hands-off policy a no-brainer for members of Congress.
The decision about whether or not to impose new regulations on tech should depend on a judgment by the policy makers that the market has failed to maintain a balance among the interests of industry, customers, suppliers, competitors, and
the country as a whole. Critics who charge that regulation is too blunt an instrument for an industry like tech are not wrong, but they miss the point. The goal of regulation is to change incentives. Industries that ignore political pressure for reform, as the internet platforms have, should expect ever more
onerous regulatory initiatives until t...
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The best way for tech to avoid heavy regulation is for the industry leaders to embrace light regulation and make appropriate ...
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Facebook Groups. Groups have a couple of features that make them vulnerable to manipulation. Anyone can start a Group, and there is no guarantee that the organizer is the person he or she claims to be. In addition, there are few limits on the names of Groups, which enables bad actors to create Groups
that appear to be more legitimate than they really are.
a Russian impersonating an American—might have formed the Group and seeded it with a number of bots. Then
they could advertise on Facebook to recruit members. The members would mostly be Americans who had no idea they were joining a Group created by Russians. They would be attracted to an idea—whether it was guns or immigration or whatever—and once in the Group, they would be exposed to
a steady flow of posts designed to provoke o...
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Whether by design or by
accident, Trump’s nomination almost certainly owed something to the Russian interference.
In the general election campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump benefited significantly from the Russian interference on Facebook. We hypothesize...
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focused on activating a minority—Trump’s base—while simultaneously suppressing t...
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However, roughly four million Obama voters
did not vote in 2016, nearly fifty-two times the vote gap in the states Clinton needed to win but didn’t.
The Russians might have invented a new kind of warfare, one perfectly suited to a fading economic power looking to regain superpower status.
We suggested that Apple could be a powerful ally, as it had no advertising-supported businesses and had made data privacy a core feature of the Apple brand.
Tristan didn’t miss a beat. “Hold a hearing and make Mark Zuckerberg testify under oath. Make him justify profiting from filter bubbles, brain hacking, and election interference.”
Two weeks later, in August 2017, the editor-in-chief of USA Today asked me to write an op-ed. It was titled “I Invested Early in Google and Facebook. Now They Terrify Me.”
Despite mounting evidence, Facebook continued to deny it had played a role in the Russian interference.
It’s easy to see why they felt that way. Facebook knows more
about user attention th...
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Then, on September 6, 2017, Facebook’s vice president of security, Alex Stamos, posted “An Update on Information Operations on Facebook.” Despite the innocuous headline, the post began with a bombshell: Facebook had uncovered one hundred thousand dollars of Russian spending on three thousand ads from June 2015 through May 2017. The three thousand ads were connected to 470 accounts that Facebook labeled as “inauthentic.” One hundred thousand
dollars does not sound like much of an ad buy, but a month later the researcher Jonathan Albright provided context when he pointed out that posts from only six of the Russia-sponsored Groups on Facebook had been shared 340 million times. Groups are built around a shared interest. Most of those doing the sharing would have been Americans who trusted that the leaders of the Group were genuine.
Russian interference on social media was exceptionally cost effective.
and I met the attorney general for dinner
When I gave him the short-form description of our work, Schneiderman asked me to work with
an advisor to his office, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. Tim is the person who coined the term “net neutrality.” He wrote a seminal book, The Attention Merchants,
