Jonathan Zittrain

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape: concentration of media, and new ways for the powerful to game it. First, we increasingly turn to only a few aggregators like Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on the world, which makes their decisions about what to show us impossibly fraught. Those aggregators draw—opaquely while consistently—from largely undifferentiated sources to figure out what to show us. They are, they often remind regulators, only aggregators rather than content originators or editors. Second, the opacity by which these platforms offer us news and set our information agendas means that we don’t have cues about whether what we see is representative of sentiment at large, or for that matter of anything, including expert consensus.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 228 new members. Members of the 2017 class include winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the Wolf Prize; MacArthur Fellows; Fields Medalists; Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Medal of Arts recipients; and Academy Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award winners. Among them are 13 Harvard faculty and two benefactors. Those elected from Harvard include Alan M. Garber, provost of Harvard University and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; John A. Quelch, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration; Jonathan L. Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law...Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the country’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing — and opportunities available to — the nation and the world.

There has been no shortage of events at Harvard on the public’s loss of trust in journalism and the prominence of fake news stories and outlets. In many ways, Thursday’s panel at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, moderated by Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow, was a practical outcome of those discussions. The panel, titled “Fake News, Concrete Responses: At the Nexus of Law, Technology, and Social Narratives,” presented four Berkman Klein staff members who talked about existing and potential tools with which to combat the wave of misinformation that escalated during the 2016 election cycle and shows no sign of slowing down today. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” quoted Bemis professor of international law Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the center.

That “fake news” is both pervasive and dangerous is no longer in doubt. How best to respond, however, is still an open subject. Because of that, the topic made for a lively panel at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society...What is fake news? The range of possibilities, said Berkman Klein Fellow An Xiao Mina, is broad enough to render the term almost meaningless, and can encompass everything from “when an Onion article is cited as news to dealing with state-sponsored propaganda botnets.” Professor Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law and co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center, offered a definition based on intent, defining fake news as that which is “willfully false,” which he said means a story “that the person saying or repeating knows to be untrue or is indifferent to whether it is true or false.”

Artificial intelligence is everywhere and it’s here to stay. Most aspects of our lives are now touched by artificial intelligence in one way or another, from deciding what books or flights to buy online to whether our job applications are successful, whether we receive a bank loan, and even what treatment we receive for cancer...For Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard Law School, there is a danger that the increasing complexity of computer systems might prevent them from getting the scrutiny they need. “I'm concerned about the reduction of human autonomy as our systems — aided by technology — become more complex and tightly coupled,” he says.

The family of the late Antonin Scalia, J.D. ’60, who was a leading associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, announced Monday that it will donate his papers to the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library...“We are deeply grateful to the Scalia family for donating Justice Scalia’s papers to his alma mater,” said John Manning, deputy dean and Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at HLS and a former clerk to Scalia...Adrian Vermeule, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS and also a former Scalia clerk, said, “Justice Scalia was, indisputably, the most influential and interesting justice of his generation, and a brilliant academic as well. His papers will be of surpassing value to future scholars, and it is fitting that they should find a home at Harvard Law School.”...Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law and director of the library, said, “The Harvard Law School Library serves not only the campus community, but the world at large..."

Google, Facebook and other online giants like to see their rapid rise as the product of their founders’ brilliance. Others argue that their success is more a result of lucky timing and network effects—the economic forces that tend to make bigger firms even bigger. Often forgotten is a third reason for their triumph: in America and, to some extent, in Europe, online platforms have been inhabiting a parallel legal universe. Broadly speaking, they are not legally responsible, either for what their users do or for the harm that their services can cause in the real world...“The internet is no longer a discrete side activity,” says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School...The industry would naturally prefer self-regulation. Platforms not only have strong incentives to spot bad actors, but good information to identify them and the means to sanction in response, notes Urs Gasser of the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Do people behave differently when they think they are being watched?...Jon Penney was nearing the end of a fellowship at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society in 2013, and he realized that Snowden’s disclosures presented an opportunity to study their effect on Americans’ online behavior...“The fact that you won’t do things, that you will self-censor, are the worst effects of pervasive surveillance,” reiterates security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman...Bemis professor of international law and of computer science Jonathan Zittrain, faculty chair of the Berkman Klein Center, worries that the ubiquity of privacy threats has led to apathy. When a hacker released former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s private assessments of the two leading presidential candidates prior to the recent election, “I was surprised at how little sympathy there was for his situation, how it was treated as any other document dump,” Zittrain explains.

On Sept. 5, 2006, Facebook transformed from a technology platform into a media company. That was the day the social media site replaced its chronological list of friends’ updates with its algorithmic news feed...Facebook’s only chance to escape this kind of responsibility may be to open its News Feed to others, says Jonathan Zittrain, a computer science and law professor at Harvard University...Zittrain suggested third-parties build on top of the existing algorithm, offering the News Feed as a customizable stream that others modify to suit their audiences.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to the social network’s website over the weekend to dispute allegations that “fake news” had tilted the election for Republican Donald Trump. “More than 99% of what people see is authentic,” he wrote, adding it was “extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election.”...Some civil-liberties experts said it was dangerous to push Facebook to take on a greater editorial role. “If we wouldn’t trust the government to curate all of what we read, why would we ever think that Facebook or any one company should do it?” said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

Our social lives are conducted on the Internet, along with purchases, entertainment and cab hailing. So why are we still using paper ballots to vote for elected officials? ...Online voting “makes it hard to forestall vote-selling, because people could much more easily prove for whom they've voted,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor. “ Countries unlike the United States that do not emphasize ballot secrecy might be better able to embrace Internet voting.”

Are you having a crushingly tedious day at work? Try playing Google autocomplete. Type the start of a question into the world’s most trusted search engine, and marvel as the aggregated curiosity of the global crowd is marshalled to anticipate your inquiry. ...Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School has since described the potential for “digital gerrymandering” — tech corporations influencing the outcome of elections by, say, sending voting reminders to some users and not others. Facebook and Twitter already know your political leanings. Digital gerrymandering is possible whenever personalised information is served up by an intermediary, and it can tilt the game when margins are narrow.

...With the presidential election around the corner, Science asked experts in computer science, business, and law to weigh in on how companies like Google and Facebook, which function as the primary gateway to online information for millions of voters, could influence the outcome...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, has written about Facebook’s unique ability to mobilize voters by placing reminders in their newsfeeds. If it wanted to, Facebook could mobilize users likely to vote in line with the company’s interests (as it tried to do in India) based on their demographic group and geographic location—a sort of digital gerrymandering capable of garnering hundreds of thousands of additional votes.

When Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop’s camera. The irony didn’t go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions. Even those of us who don’t control large corporations have reason to worry about surveillance, both licit and illicit. Here’s how governments, terrorists, corporations, identity thieves, spammers, and personal enemies could observe us in the future, and how we might respond...Perhaps we’ll also see a shifting of social norms. If everyone’s embarrassing behavior is accessible in perpetuity, we may become inured to employees’ college benders and even to senators’ sexts. Will paranoia reduce misbehavior, or will humans be humans and maintain our blithe and blundering ways? “It’s hard to change our daily habits,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “I don’t know if that’s a reason for optimism, because it means we’re not going to be chilled, or pessimism, because we appear to be resigned to losing our privacy without thinking it through first.”