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Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galev, and I'm here with today's guest, Aviv Ovadia.

Aviv is the former chief technologist for the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan.

And for the last couple of years now, he's been working on tackling the problem of misinformation and disinformation

and other related threats to our democracy and the stability of our civilization. So that's

what we're going to be talking about today. Aviv, welcome to rationally speaking. Thanks for having

me on. So Aviv, there is thisally speaking. Thanks for having me on. So, Aviv,

there is this very widely shared article about you in BuzzFeed earlier this year, and it described

how you had sort of tried to sound the alarm about what they referred to as fake news to Silicon

Valley pretty early on, like before the 2016 election, and your warnings were, as they said,

not taken all that seriously. Can you describe, like, in what way did you sound the alarm and

how did people react? I talked publicly and privately to people at the different platforms

...