Extra-condensed knowledge

HBR Summary. MIT Sloan’s Sinan Aral, author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How we Must Adapt, speaks with HBR about what the world needs to do to contain the chaotic consequences of online platforms.
HBR Question. The question now is: How do we — as citizens, corporations, and governments — responsibly wield the burgeoning power of online platforms and reckon with their real-life consequences?

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Condensed knowledge

HBR Summary. MIT Sloan’s Sinan Aral, author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How we Must Adapt, speaks with HBR about what the world needs to do to contain the chaotic consequences of online platforms.
HBR Question. The question now is: How do we — as citizens, corporations, and governments — responsibly wield the burgeoning power of online platforms and reckon with their real-life consequences?
To try to answer this question, I spoke with Sinan Aral, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How we Must Adapt, about how this latest story fits into the emerging trend of unwieldy and deeply consequential activity on online platforms.

What would it mean to regain control over online platforms? I do think that we can steer this technology towards good and away from bad. But in order to do that, we really need to dig into the science of social media and pull those levers (i.e., money, code, norms, and laws) accordingly.

By money I mean the platforms’ business models, which provide the incentives for user behavior, advertiser behavior, and investor behavior.
Code is the design of the platforms and the algorithms that underlie them, whether it’s newsfeed algorithms or “people you may know” algorithms and so on.
Norms are the real-world social behaviors around the platforms. How do people actually use this stuff?
And then laws, which encompass everything from antitrust to Section 230 to privacy legislation to the modernization of SEC guidelines.

How and where do they draw the lines? That’s the big question. It ultimately comes down to the difference between free speech and harmful speech, whether it’s around politics or financial information.
What do you think is an underrated takeaway of the GameStop story that you think people should pay attention to? I think it’s important for people to realize that when it comes to markets, social media doesn’t operate in isolation.

Category 2: The Big Picture of the Digital Age

[genioux fact produced, deduced or extracted from HBR]

Type of essential knowledge of this “genioux fact”: Essential Deduced and Extracted Knowledge (EDEK).

Type of validity of the "genioux fact".

Authors of the genioux fact

Fernando Machuca

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ramsey Khabbaz is an assistant editor at Harvard Business Review.