Giving a lecture on 'New Frontiers of Media Manipulation' at Emory University
It’s a difficult time to be in the media business. The old-established business models are crumbling, technology platforms are rapidly changing the rules of the game on a whim, and there is a rising public backlash to the perception of bias, whether fair or not. There is, however, another set of challenges on the horizon that will make each one of these worse: a new generation of audio, image, and video forgery technology.
It was my pleasure to speak with Professor Holli Semetko’s political communications class about what they can expect ahead in their careers.
Over an hour and a half, we walked through the changing nature of identity and reputation, how disinformation has become a trigger for consequential geopolitical events, why Facebook is failing in their attempt to reengineer how the news works, and what the role is for journalists personally in all of this. It’s incredibly important to me that we do whatever we can to work towards having a robust, free, and credible media industry - thank you to Professor Semetko for the opportunity for me to offer advice on how we can get there.
I hope to have the chance to bring this message to other media schools in the future, we need to start building the capabilities to deal with this now.