Design Matters in the Intervention

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I think it's fair to say that you never can really predict with accuracy how things will evolve. And so i think, in many ways, this is the scenario that we had planned for. We've seen major platforms like twitter create design changes to their own services to better tackle disinformation and misinformation in the elections. That's something that we hadn't seen before. I'm hoping that the third thing, we turned a corner on this idea that design matters in the intervention that we'are going to consider to tackle miss and nformation.

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.