Title of the session: The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health -- and How We Must Adapt

Time: 12pm EST / 6pm CET

The event is organized by the IMD Alumni Club of New York, in collaboration with the IMD Alumni Clubs of the United States, Canada, Mexico and South America.

Professor Aral will discuss the subject of his latest book The Hype Machine (on-sale now). In it, Aral provides an overview of social media’s ascendance, how it affects our decision-making and shapes our world, while providing clear-eyed prescriptions for how we can protect ourselves from fake news deception and social media manipulation.

For registration, please contact the Club.  This event is open to IMD Alumni only.

About the presenter:

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he holds a joint appointment in the IT and Marketing groups and co-leads the Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Sinan is a leading expert on Social Networks, Social Media, and Digital Strategy. He has worked closely with all major social media and leading Fortune 500 companies on realizing business value from social media and IT investments.

He is also an entrepreneur, a partner at Manifest Capital (a VC fund), and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil.

Sinan's research focuses on social contagion, product virality, and measuring and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks affects information worker productivity, consumer demand, and viral marketing.

His research has won numerous awards, including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and multiple Best Paper Awards. He was also recently named one of the Top 40 Professors Under 40 by Poets and Quants.

Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University, and received his Ph.D. from MIT.