Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E135 | Mutale Nkonde: How to get more truth from social media A sociologist and former journalist warns that the artificial intelligence behind much of today’s social media is inherently biased, but it’s not too late to do something about it. The old maxim holds that a lie spreads much faster than a truth, but it has taken the global reach and lightning speed of social media to lay it bare before the world. One problem of the age of misinformation, says sociologist and former journalist Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), is that the artificial intelligence algorithms used to profile users and disseminate information to them, whether truthful or not, are inherently biased against minority groups, because they are underrepresented in the historical data upon which the algorithms are based. Now, Nkonde and others like her are holding social media’s feet to the fire, so to speak, to get them to root out bias from