45 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: “We need to make sure we have authentic sources that we can trust. And I think that we literally need trust campaigns for major media organisations, so that people can have renewed trust in their veracity.”
about the ethical use of such an influential tool?
organisations, so that people can have renewed faith in their veracity. We also have to have transparency, and I think we have a need to figure out how we’re going to be more transparent in virtual reality. And then we have to have a population that believes they have a responsibility for how they share media, and for the truthfulness of the information they share. One study showed that it’s people aged over 50 or 60 who are sharing the most false information. And I think it’s because they have no literacy in this medium of the new technological age. To illustrate the problem, I show pictures of Hillary Clinton when Osama bin Laden was captured and assassinated. It was
being livestreamed back to the White House, and there’s a photograph with two women in the room – Hillary Clinton, and another woman in the back. And for a number of news organisations in the Middle East, they photoshopped out the women, because they didn’t want the women in the room with the men. So the fake news problem is not a new one, and it’s not going to go away, but we need to be constantly vigilant. There was a great MIT study showing that fake stuff will hit the internet at a speed that is much greater than truth. So, it’s also going to be up to us to educate people about the issue of fake news before they push that share button.
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Well, that’s another ethical question that gets talked about a lot. I was on a commission with The Aspen Institute and the Knight Foundation on trust, media and democracy. It tried to deal with how you make sure that you have veracity with your sources and material. There are a lot of tools now for creating deep fakes, and it is a very thorny issue. What we need is critical thinking. We have to teach critical thinking. We need to make sure we have authentic sources that we can trust. And I think that we literally need trust campaigns for major media
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