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Infocalypse Now
Article

Infocalypse Now

He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse.

Buzzfeed, 2018

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Recommendation

By predicting the fake news scandals surrounding the 2016 US presidential election campaign, tech engineer Aviv Ovadya has become an early Cassandra of Silicon Valley. Yet today, Ovadya believes that your children will look at the post-2016 election fallout with nostalgia. He warns that AI-enhanced technology is steering the world toward a disinformation apocalypse. To learn more about Ovadya’s background and thinking, getAbstract recommends you read Charlie Warzel’s recent post on BuzzFeed News.

Summary

Aviv Ovadya abruptly left his career as a Silicon Valley engineer in 2016 when it became clear to him that the world was at the verge of an information crisis. Already, before the 2016 US presidential elections and subsequent revelations about Russia’s stealth influence campaign, Ovadya warned that malicious actors can easily manipulate today’s most widely used online platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to spread and selectively target people with misinformation.

According to Ovadya, new technological tools will enable malicious actors to do even more harm...

About the Author

Charlie Warzel is a senior writer for BuzzFeed News.