Who Controls What You See? Content in the Internet Age

Join us and grab a drink as one of the world’s leading scholars on misinformation explores how the internet shapes what we see, think, and believe.

Welcome to Binge Thinking! We host professors at local pubs to give talks on fascinating topics.

Topic: Who Controls What You See?
Speaker: David Lazer (Northeastern University)

David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Science at Northeastern University and one of the world’s leading experts on misinformation and computational social science. He is Co-Director of the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science and previously served on the faculty at Harvard Kennedy School. His research has been published in Science, Nature, and PNAS, and featured in outlets like the New York Times, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.

In this talk, Professor Lazer will explore how we get information about the world in the internet age and how dramatically that system has changed.

Over the past two decades, our attention has shifted from newspapers, TV, and direct sources to a handful of global platforms that mediate nearly everything we see. Information is no longer tied to where it comes from. Instead, it flows through feeds — curated, personalized, and optimized for engagement.

We’ve moved from habitual consumption (reading the same paper every morning) to something very different: a mix of incidental discovery and algorithmic suggestion.

This shift has profound consequences.

Content is increasingly concentrated among a small number of creators. Platforms are designed to keep you on them, not send you elsewhere. Communities form around shared interests, often detached from geography or shared reality. And now, with the rise of AI, even the open web itself may be at risk.

Drawing on decades of research, Professor Lazer will break down how this system emerged, how it works today, and where it might be heading next.

Because understanding who controls what you see is the first step to understanding the world itself.

7:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat and order some drinks
8:00 PM – Host introduction
8:05 PM – Lecture begins
8:50 PM – Audience Q&A
9:00–9:30 PM – Mingle with the speaker and other guests

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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