Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired. Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”
Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.”
Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”
In an article for The Washington Post, Prof. Charles Stewart III examines how the rural-urban divide is reshaping American politics. “Between 2016 and 2020, votes shifted most in the middle of that rural-urban continuum,” writes Stewart. “These regions’ voters are likely to be most prone to shifting again in 2024.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III writes for The New York Times about claims of voter fraud in Philadelphia. “The evidence available in the public record demonstrates on its own that the claim of widespread fraud is itself a fraud,” notes Stewart.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Charles Stewart III notes that the administration of the 2020 presidential election was a success. “Even as we enter a contentious stretch of litigation, in which every aspect of the election infrastructure will be scrutinized,” writes Stewart, “the U.S. should be thankful for the heroic—and successful—efforts of election administrators around the country.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks with Guardian reporter Sam Levine about what might happen after the polls close on election night. “In most states, the pace of counting and reporting is going to be slowed by a few hours. In some states, they’re going to be feeding more ballots into scanners after the polls close, and that’s going to take some time,” says Stewart. He adds that he believes we’re going to “know more than you think on election night.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks with David Brancaccio of Marketplace about the history of voting technology. “Voting would be very different in the United States without the use of computing technologies,” says Stewart, “much like all of public policy, and actually all of our commercial lives, would be very different without the use of information technology to create the networks to do all of the transactions and allow us to do almost everything we do hundreds of times every day.”
Writing for WBUR, Prof. Charles Stewart III argues that “whether an actual constitutional crisis emerges in the days following the election will depend on the careful, serious counting of every single vote that has been cast. As citizens, we need to be focused on that process, and not on distractions and delays of a desperate candidate.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks with Steve Inskeep of NPR about early voting in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Stewart notes that, thus far, we’re seeing, “the sort of friction we get in a high-energy election on the first few days. Voters are eager to vote, and election officials are learning whether they have enough capacity at their early voting sites. And some places, it looks like they don't.”
Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.
MIT Prof. Charles Stewart III and Stanford Prof. Nathaniel Persily write for The Washington Post about a new survey they conducted that finds “registered voters harbor worries about voting in this election that diverge in predictable ways, given their partisan affiliations. Despite these worries, most are confident that their ballots will be counted accurately.”
Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”
In a piece exploring why certain countries experience wealth or poverty, The Economist spotlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s book, “The Narrow Corridor,” and recent research by Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson. The Economist notes that Acemoglu and Johnnson “found a further element of randomness which may explain contemporary patterns of wealth and poverty—namely, which countries are more prone to certain diseases.”
Writing for The Washington Post, Prof. Charles Stewart III examines the risks posed by voting by mail. “The greatest risks of voting by mail are voters’ own mistakes,” writes Stewart. “To minimize this problem, election officials can warn voters that a mistake on their absentee ballot means it won’t be counted — or they can design ballots and instructions using plain language.”