Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war

On one panel, Ressa; Emily Bell, of the Tow Center; and Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist who writes for The New York Times and Wired, discussed the overwhelming effect of junk information on our public sphere, and the role of social media platforms in disseminating it. Tufekci argued that, in the 21st century, a surfeit of information, rather than its absence, poses the biggest problem. “When I was growing up in Turkey, the way censorship occurred was there was one TV channel and they wouldn’t show you stuff. That was it,” she said. “Currently, in my conceptualization, the way censorship occurs is by information glut. It’s not that the relevant information isn’t out there. But it is buried in so much information of suspect credibility that it doesn’t mean anything.” Tufekci cited the frenzied reporting, during the 2016 election, on WikiLeaks’s dump of hacked Democratic Party emails—much of which lacked crucial context—as a malign example of the trend. “I don’t think traditional journalism has caught up on this,” she said.