The Tenuous Relationship Between Technology and Social Innovation

Technology can magnify the power of grassroots organizing and social innovation, but it can sometimes bring about societal harm, whether intentionally or not.

At SSIR’s 2018 Frontiers of Social Innovation conference, Rob Reich, a Marc and Laura Andreessen faculty co-director of Stanford PACS, explores the implications for the social sector and free speech in conversation with Kelly Born, a program manager at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative, and Arisha Hatch, a managing director of campaigns at Color of Change, the largest online racial justice organization in the United States. They touch on topics including election integrity in the United States, online organizing around discriminatory policing, and the spread of hate speech and false information on social media platforms.

“Our democracy, our informational ecosystem, has been outsourced to a very few, very powerful platforms,” says Reich. “We don’t really know how the algorithms that power them are working to facilitate the very communication that we all depend upon.”