Alternative Social Media Platforms - For the First Time

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In this election cycle, we have also seen, for the first time, a meaningful, mainstream roll of alternative social media platforms. We've got these different narratives that are spinning up in real time. And now i'm imagining there's like, if you imagine the inputs to the chocolate factory,. Now we've got parlor inputs, gab inputs, twitch inputs, we've got all these other networks. It starts to show up on the dashboard of someone in the piece room, and you start to see that go by.

Disinformation researchers have been fighting two battles over the last decade: one to combat and contain harmful information, and one to convince the world that these manipulations have an offline impact that requires complex, nuanced solutions. Camille François, Chief Information Officer at the cybersecurity company Graphika and an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, believes that our common understanding of the problem has recently reached a new level. In this interview, she catalogues the key changes she observed between studying Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and helping convene and operate the Election Integrity Partnership watchdog group before, during and after the 2020 election. “I'm optimistic, because I think that things that have taken quite a long time to land are finally landing, and because I think that we do have a diverse set of expertise at the table,” she says. Camille and Tristan Harris dissect the challenges and talk about the path forward to a healthy information ecosystem.