thinkers50 award winner
Sinan AralForensically and persuasively gets to the reality inside social media and tech.
01. ranked thinker
Ranked in 2021.
02. award winner
Winner of the Thinkers50 2021 Digital Thinking Award.
03. fast fact
In 2014, was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40”.
ideas

BIO
Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, IT, Marketing and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies and at Humin, a social platform. He is currently 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. He was the Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Times in 2013.
Content
In 2018, published highly influential article on the “Spread of False News Online,” which was on the cover of Science. Also author of The Hype Machine (2021), about how social media is disrupting our elections, our economies and our lives. The book offers an insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical ideas on how to protect ourselves.
website
VERDICT
“Few can match Sinan Aral’s combination of research and original insight into the world of tech.”
Stuart Crainer & Des Dearlove, Thinkers50