Trust, Signals, and the Future of Online Platforms

With great power comes great responsibility. Tech giant Facebook has spent the last few months battling criticism for the spread of fake news that led to Russian interference during the US election as well as massive data privacy breaches impacting millions of users involving Cambridge Analytica, a third party political consultancy. In light of these challenges, Cornell Tech Professor Mor Naaman will be digging into why and how data privacy matters to users, and how online platforms will need to evolve in the future. Vivian Luisa Schiller, former president and CEO of National Public Radio and Head of News at Twitter, will be joining Mor for the discussion.

Mor Naaman is an associate professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech, where he is the founder of the Connective Media hub, leads a research group focused on social technologies, and directs the Oath-supported Connected Experiences laboratory. His research group designs, builds, and studies systems that support social interactions in online and physical spaces. Mor applies multidisciplinary methods to 1) gain a better understanding of people and their use of social tech; 2) extract insights about people, technology and society from social media and other sources of social data, and 3) develop new social technologies as well as novel tools to make social data more accessible and usable in various settings.

Vivian Schiller '83 is Editor in Chief at Weber Shandwick. She is also the former president and CEO of National Public Radio, former head of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter, and former senior vice president and chief digital officer for NBC News, including oversight of NBCNews.com. Vivian is a proud Cornell alum.