The Meaning of Responsibility in a Twitter Message

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When you click tweet, you saw a wall of faces of every single human being that is affected by your words. When i was actually at ghoul, this never shipped, but there was actually someone working on the gmal team who was just testing this with emal. We see all those eyeballs looking at us. We feel responsibility. If you don't see the eyeballs looked at us, we don't feel responsibility. So that's actually a small example of, i think, closing that gap in what it could look like if you're trying to make a functioning brain.

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.