Raffi Krikorian: Social platforms should be more transparent

At the end of 2017 Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Democratic National Committee Raffi Krikorian gave an interview to MIT Technology Review magazine.  

Itel.am introduces certain noteworthy excerpts from the interview of Raffi Krikorian, former Director of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center and VP of Engineering Platform at Twitter.

From Silicon Valley into politics

After the presidential election, I just felt that the world was broken and I needed to find a place where I could apply what I’d learned in my previous roles to see if I could make a difference.

Improvement of security

Security’s an arms race. We have a target on us in the same way that most multinational corporations do, but we don’t have the budget of a big company. All our services such as e-mail have now been moved to cloud infrastructure run by companies like Microsoft and Google.

We’re also focusing on culture change. We actively phish our own people and publicize internally which teams have the worst compliance. We’re also in the final stages of hiring a chief security officer.

Artificial Intelligence

We need to be starting long-term, authentic conversations today with every American in order to get to the next presidential election in 2020. That means developing a deeper appreciation of the different issues that interest people. I think that artificial intelligence and machine learning will help us to better understand and segment audiences on a scale that’s not been done before, even by some of the biggest companies in the world.

Fake news and social networks’ fight

I don’t think my former employer or Facebook are doing enough here. It’s certainly a very difficult problem. At the heart of it are things like fake accounts, hijacked accounts, and trolling accounts. We’re now seeing outside researchers doing some really interesting work to try and identify the bots spreading fake news.

Online political advertising

Social platforms need to make it obvious who is paying for political ads online and how much they’re spending. This would fix a lot of the problem, but there needs to be some formal regulation of online political advertising too.

You can read Itel.am’s interview with Raffi Krikorian here.