Understanding decision-making systems and what that means for governance, corporations, and technology creators. — This is the first piece in a set of work on ‘Reimagining Technology’; Most of my prior public work focused on misinformation, online platforms, platform/AI governance, and the impacts of AI/ML. This may look somewhat tangential—but is actually deeply connected. Later pieces can be found here.

This was originally provided as a public comment to the Facebook Oversight Board to inform its decision on President Trump’s Facebook account; that document can be found here. It is being shared here for ease of reading, and because of the media literacy connection between ‘literacy friction’ and the recently…

AI-augmented knowledge summarization, refactoring, & integration are about to transform the world. Again. — Technology creators, funders, and policymakers must understand how changes in knowledge operations can impact society. This is intended to be a short primer making a series of claims about these impacts. Each claim could be a book (many are). 1. Knowledge operations matter. Knowledge operations are ‘actions that involve the conveying or processing of…

Metrics are key to how product teams at tech companies function — After the 2020 election, a Twitter dashboard that I first prototyped four years before started going wild. It estimates misinformation prevalence by monitoring “the percent of retweets and likes pointing toward domains that had made a habit of sharing misinformation.” This metric had been going up throughout the election cycle…

How, when, and why synthetic media can be used for harm — This is post is an excerpted section from a working paper with Jess Whittlestone (shared in 2019, but minimal updates were needed). While the full paper was focused on synthetic media research, this section is far more broadly applicable and often referenced in other contexts—it applies in general to malicious…

Rumors on WhatsApp have led to mob violence. Here’s how to prevent them — without sacrificing privacy. — I originally published this in Bloomberg Opinion in 2019. Reprinted with permission. The opinions expressed are those of the author. For more detail addressing potential obstacles, see this follow-up post. Last July, an engineer at Accenture was beaten to death by a crowd that thought he was a child kidnapper…

How can we fortify our “Knowledge Pipeline” in the face of synthetic media? — Close to two years ago, I started applying the framework described below in order explore ways to reduce the negative impacts of synthetic media (and other forms of misinformation). It’s not perfect, but I’ve found it useful enough to share in venues around the world, and I am continuing to…

Considerations and potential release practices for machine learning — Jess Whittlestone and I recently distributed a working paper exploring the challenges and options around ensuring that machine learning research is not used for harm, focusing on the challenges of synthetic media. This post is just a brief overview so read or skim the full paper here—and it was written…

And how should that change the way we approach security and disclosure? — The technology now exists to create tools for gathering public information on people and spear-phishing them — automatically, at scale. Or creating a system that uses calls with forged realistic voices to impersonate someone. These new attack capabilities are being made possible by modern AI and may have significant implications…