TECH / OUTSIDE YOUR BUBBLEBelievable: The Terrifying Future Of Fake News"What happens when
anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?"Charlie
WarzelBuzzFeed News ReporterPosted on February 11, 2018, at 8:45 p.m. ETIn mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya
realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — sowrong that he abandoned his
work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, hepresented his concerns to
technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisisof misinformation in a
presentation he titled “Infocalypse.”The web and the information ecosystem that had developed around it
was wildly unhealthy, Ovadyaargued. The incentives that governed its biggest platforms were calibrated to
reward information thatwas often misleading and polarizing, or both. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and
Google prioritizedclicks, shares, ads, and money over quality of information, and Ovadya couldn’t shake the
feeling thatit was all building toward something bad — a kind of critical threshold of addictive and
toxicmisinformation. The presentation was largely ignored by employees from the Big Tech platforms —
including a few from Facebook who would later go on to drive the company’s NewsFeed
integrityeffort.https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news
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