On the 9 Mar. 2026 PBS ‘Settle In’ video podcast, titled “Hany Farid and Amna Nawaz discuss spotting manipulated images,” interviewer Nawaz talks with “pioneering digital forensic expert Hany Farid” [University of California, Berkely] about “why disinformation spreads online, how to find reliable sources of information, and why he’s still hopeful about our digital future.”
As Hany says, “The thing to understand about social media is that not only that it doesn’t care about real, fake, true, lies, it actually prefers, algorithmically, the spread of misinformation because that’s what leads to user engagement. Algorithms have learned how to spread the most salacious, conspiratorial content because that’s what billions of people online click on, so in many ways, we’ve known this for a long time, the lies spread much faster than the truth.” He goes on to explain that the reason is that the business model of the social media companies is engagement: “The more you click, the more ads we deliver, the more money they make,” and that the algorithms have learned from our clicks what we will engage with. “Rage bait works. Click bait works. We click on it. So we have to return to our trusted sources . . . there is a speed/accuracy trade-off. The faster you get your information the less accurate it is. I would much, much rather wait until tomorrow morning and know what’s going on than be lied to in the intervening twelve hours.” “People have to understand that social media was never designed to be a reliable source of information.”
Amna comments, “The majority of Americans do get their information from social media. That’s where we are right now,” and that it would be an enormous cultural shift for Americans to move away from the misinformation of social media to more reliable sources of information.
Hany replies that the move away from cigarette smoking gives us hope that big cultural changes can occur when the habit is harmful to us, and he notes that currently there are massive litigations occurring regarding social media, and that recent legislation has been passed in Australia (which bans social media for kids under the age of sixteen) and legislation is being considered in the UK and other parts of the world, but that efforts to rein in the harmful aspects of social media will take fighting back against massive, massive corporate interests.
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