WITNESS featured in Harvard Business Review

We are pleased to announce that our Program Director Sam Gregory was recently interviewed by Scott Berinato for the Harvard Business Review about WITNESS and the future of news and synthetic media.

In the article titled, “Business in the Age of Computational Propaganda and Deep Fakes,” Sam spoke about the reality of deep fakes and how WITNESS is working with companies to inform them of the potential of deep fakes to influence people (not only in the political sphere) and on dealing with synthetic media.

“Deliberately polluting the environment to erode trust is a common authoritarian tactic. So we have to guard against it… In human rights, that could mean identifying an audience that you want to target hate speech at… In business, I think about phishing scams in which someone fakes a voice you trust. These are some of the threat models we have been laying out as we try to address the dangers of mis- and disinformation broadly.” Sam said during the interview.

You can access the full interview here.