• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE and Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

• Christopher Graves – President & Founder, Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science

Enjoy a 15-minute break!

• David Rand (Moderator) – Professor, MIT Sloan and Research Lead, MIT IDE
• Kate Klonick – Associate Professor of Law, St. John’s University
• Tom Cunningham – Economist

Combatting Misinformation Online

Enjoy lunch!

• Renée Richardson Gosline (Moderator) – Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan and Research Lead, MIT IDE
• Anthony Habayeb – Co-Founder & CEO, Monitaur
• Paris Marx – Writer and Host, ‘Tech Won’t Save Us‘
• Kalinda Ukanwa – Assistant Professor of Marketing, USC Marshall School of Business

Enjoy a 15-minute break!

• Renée DiResta (Moderator) – Technical Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
• Mitchell Baker – Chief Executive Officer and Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation
• Michael Masnick – Editor ‘Techdirt’, CEO Copia Institute
• Sarah Oh – CoFounder, T2

The Future of Social Media and Emerging Ecosystems

As social media continues to evolve and shape our daily lives, there is growing interest in understanding the potential impact of emerging social media platforms on the future of these platforms. This panel will explore the various ways in which social media is likely to evolve over the coming years, with a particular focus on the emergence of new platforms such as Blue Sky and Mastodon, which prioritize decentralization and user control. Experts will discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by these new developments, as well as the potential implications for user privacy, security, and social dynamics. Ultimately, the panel aims to provide insight into the future of social media and the ways in which emerging platforms will shape this rapidly changing landscape.

• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE and Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Sinan Aral a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a Founding Partner at Manifest Capital. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. Sinan has helped leading Fortune 500 firms, including Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, Spotify, AirBnB, Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP and The New York Times to realize business value from big data analytics, social media and IT investments. His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science magazine and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline. Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winner and among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic and a must-read for business leaders at every level of management. A managerial economist and econometrician by training, Sinan’s expertise spans social networks, causal inference, the design and analysis of large-scale digital experiments, machine learning, predictive modeling, natural language processing, AI, big data, marketing, IT, social commerce, ecommerce, behavior change and economic productivity. He earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Mitchell Baker co-founded the Mozilla Project to support the open, innovative web and ensure it continues offering opportunities for everyone. As CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell is focused on accelerating the growth levers for the core Firefox browser product and platform, while investing in innovative solutions to mitigate the biggest challenges facing the internet.

As Chairwoman of Mozilla for the last two decades, Mitchell Baker has been responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide, collective of employees and volunteers who are building the internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Mitchell is deeply engaged in developing product offerings that promote the mission of empowering individuals. She also guides the overall scope and direction of Mozilla’s mission. Mitchell has written the key documents that set out Mozilla’s enduring mission and commitments — the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum — also known as the Pledge for a Healthy Internet — in 2018.

Mitchell is a strong advocate for the open internet, open source, and the importance of connecting technology to its impact on individuals and society. She is highly regarded as one of the pioneers of the web and bringing the open internet to consumers. She was instrumental in Netscape’s decision in 1998 to release its source code to the public. This later led to the release of the Firefox browser and the creation of the Mozilla Foundation as a global technology force that spans software product development, educational initiatives, and participatory movements. After co-founding the Mozilla Project, Mitchell served as its general manager and CEO from 1999 until January 2008, when the organization’s rapid growth encouraged her to split her responsibilities and add a CEO.

Mitchell is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Oxford Internet Institute and the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. She is a Board Member of OpenMRS, Inc., which develops open source medical records systems for use in resource-constrained environments. She co-chaired the U.S. Department of Commerce Digital Economy Board of Advisors from its inception in March 2016 until August 2017, served on the United Nations High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, and the ICANN High Level Panel on Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mitchell received her B.A. in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her J.D. from Berkeley Law.

TIME Magazine profiled Mitchell in its global list of “100 Most Influential People” under “Scientists and Thinkers”. Bloomberg listed her as one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Web”. She was honored as winner of the Anita Borg Institute’s 2009 Women of Vision Award and received the Aenne Burda Award for Creative Leadership in 2010. In 2012, Mitchell was inducted into the founding group of the Internet Society’s Hall of Fame. In 2018 she received the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award. She also received an honorary doctorate from the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. She has written op-eds for the Atlantic and CNN.com and appeared on NBC “Meet the Press”, BBC “HardTalk”, “CNN Global Office” , NBC’s “Weekend Today”, France 24, the UK’s Channel 4 and NPR’s “Morning Edition”. She has spoken at high-level events like Tech for Good, VivaTech, Wired NextFest, World Economic Forum, Mobile World Congress, Web Summit, Collision and Singularity University.

Tom Cunningham worked at Facebook for five years, and Twitter for one year, as an economist and data scientist. Before that he was on the Economics faculty at Stockholm University, and spent time as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, and Caltech. He has worked on content moderation (engagement-based signals of quality, quality-engagement tradeoffs), experimentation (shrinkage, network experimentation), and company strategy (cross-app competition, tipping points), and conducts academic work on identifying implicit preferences in decision-making.

Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renee investigates the spread of narratives across social and media networks, with an interest in understanding how platform algorithms and affordances intersect with user behavior and factional crowd dynamics. She studies how actors leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence, from domestic activists promoting health misinformation and conspiracy theories, to the full-spectrum information operations executed by state actors.

At the behest of SSCI, Renee led an investigation into the Russian Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society, and presented public testimony. A year later, she led an additional investigation into influence capabilities that the GRU used alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election. Renee has studied influence operations and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorist activity, and state-sponsored information warfare, and has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civil society, and business organizations on the topic.

Renée regularly writes and speaks about technology policy, and influence operations. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Yale Review, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more. She appeared in the documentary The Social Dilemma.

As founder of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science at Ogilvy Consulting, Chris works to boost the effectiveness of every client engagement through applying a deep understanding of the “Real Why” of human behavior. His work also decodes the “Hidden Who” of individuals at scale using proprietary new lenses of personality trait science, worldviews, and thinking styles. Previously, Chris served as Global CEO and Chair of Ogilvy Public Relations, and served two terms as the public relations industry chair. In his first career, he worked as a top news media executive at the Wall Street Journal and CNBC for more than 20 years. Chris has been honored with a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency as well as earned four annual Atticus Award honors (the highest thought leadership award among the more than 360 companies that make up WPP). He was named a “Top 25 Innovator” in the U.S. and named to the Hall of Fame by both Campaign Asia and ICCO (International Communications Consultancy Organization). He was elected life member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2010.

Anthony Habayeb, CEO and co-founder of Monitaur, heads a leading AI governance software company. Monitaur customers deliver trustworthy AI and critical models that business leaders, regulators and consumers can trust. Habayeb brings a wealth of experience from his strategic consulting days at Accenture and executive roles at Gannett, Monster, and Yahoo!. He also advises AI companies globally and in Boston’s thriving ecosystem.

Kate Klonick teaches Property, Internet Law, and a seminar on information privacy. Klonick’s research focuses on law and technology, most recently on private platform governance of online speech.

Klonick’s scholarly work has appeared in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, The Georgetown Law Journal, the peer-reviewed Copyright Journal of the U.S.A., The Maryland Law Review, and The Southern California Law Review. Her popular press writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Lawfare, Slate, Vox and numerous other publications.

Professor Klonick holds an A.B. with honors from Brown University where she studied both modern American History and cognitive neuroscience, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where she was a Senior Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School. She clerked for Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York and Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit. She is an affiliated fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is on leave for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University.

You can follow Professor Klonick on Twitter @klonick.

Paris Marx is Canadian tech critic and host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. He holds a Master’s degree in urban geography from McGill University and is the author of “Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.” Paris’ writing on technology and politics has been published in Time Magazine, Wired Magazine, NBC News, CBC News, and many others.

Mike Masnick is the founder & editor of the popular Techdirt blog as well as the founder of the Silicon Valley think tank, the Copia Institute. In both roles, he explores the intersection of technology, innovation, policy, law, civil liberties, and economics. His writings have been cited by Congress and the EU Parliament. According to a Harvard Berkman Center study, his coverage of the SOPA copyright bill made Techdirt the most linked-to media source during the course of that debate. His pivotal 2019 paper, “Protocols, Not Platforms” was cited by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as the inspiration for Twitter to explore a fundamental shift in strategy and to create Bluesky.. Masnick and Techdirt have also been key players in the ongoing battles over Section 230, net neutrality, encryption and anti-SLAPP laws. Via the Copia Institute, Masnick has pioneered new uses of games & simulations to help better explain complex present issues and explore future possibilities. Masnick is also known for coining the term “The Streisand Effect,” to describe how attempting to stifle speech online can serve to draw even more attention.

Sarah Oh is Co-Founder of T2 (t2.social), a new public short text platform. Sarah has more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of tech and rights-based issues globally, most recently as Human Rights Advisor at Twitter where she is focused on the use of social media to promote and safeguard human rights. Previously she led Facebook’s crisis response efforts in the Asia-Pacific region as a senior member of the Strategic Response Team within the Office of the CEO and COO. In this role, she oversaw Facebook’s response to major elections and events in the region, including the 2017 Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar. Sarah is currently a Nonresident Fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at The Atlantic Council and member of Search for Common Ground’s President’s Leadership Council. She was previously a Visiting Scholar at The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute at the University of California. Sarah earned a B.A. in political science with honors from Northwestern University and grew up in Southern California.

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Team, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Bridging the fields of cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, David’s research combines behavioral experiments run online and in the field with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and “fake news,” understanding political psychology and polarization, and promoting human cooperation. David received his BA in computational biology from Cornell University in 2004 and his PhD in systems biology from Harvard University in 2009, was a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology from 2009 to 2013, and was an Assistant and then Associate Professor (with tenure) of Psychology, Economics, and Management at Yale University prior to joining the faculty at MIT.

David’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Economic Review, Psychological Science, Management Science, New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Political Science, and has received widespread attention from print, radio, TV, and social media outlets. He has also written popular press articles for outlets including the New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, and the Psychological Observer. He was named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” chosen as a 2012 Pop!Tech Science Fellow, and awarded the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, and the 2020 FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Papers he has coauthored have been awarded Best Paper of the Year in Experimental Economics, Social Cognition, and Political Methodology.

Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the head of the Human-First AI Group at MIT’s Initiative on The Digital Economy.

She is a 2020 honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe,” and has been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. Gosline is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications for cognitive bias in human decision-making. She is currently completing a book on how we can be smarter in our use of friction to improve decision-making and share value.

Renée’s most recent research examines how social structure and technology intersect to affect performance and judgment, as discussed in her 2022 SXSW featured talk, “In Praise of Friction.” She has also pioneered an acclaimed Executive Education course called “Breakthrough CX,” which examines the nexus of Behavioral Economics, AI, and Market Stratgey.

Her academic projects have examined: how cognitive style predicts preference for AI versus human input; the interaction of brand status and placebo effects in performance; how consumers determine “real” from “fake” products; the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms; and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion. In order to address these issues rigorously, Gosline employs experimental methodology, both in the field and the laboratory.

Renée enjoys collaborating with firms on CX, Digital Media Strategy, and Leadership. Prior to academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH Moet Hennessy and Leo Burnett.

Renée conducted her Undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctoral education at Harvard University.

Dr. Kalinda Ukanwa is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern California. A quantitative modeler, Professor Ukanwa researches how algorithmic bias and algorithmic decision-making impact firms and consumers. She is the winner of the 2018 Eli Jones Promising Young Scholar Award and a finalist for the 2018 INFORMS Service Science Best Student Paper Award, 2019 Howard/AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the 2020 AMS Mary Kay Doctoral Dissertation Award. In a prior life, Professor Ukanwa was an industrial engineer, financial analyst, and finance executive at Walt Disney, Citigroup, Viacom, and Kaplan.