Zeynep Tufekci

Even common colds can cause fatal outbreaks in nursing homes.

It's not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree - eventually, at least some of the time - on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn't mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform.

When it comes to strength training, the industry pushes women to under-exercise, and men to over-exercise, accompanied by pictures of people who almost certainly are not merely weight-training. This is just as wrong.

Very few of us consider strength-training as essential exercise, but it is. It is especially crucial as one ages, because a natural part of the aging process is losing muscle.

We have long known most everything there is to know about what the average adult in reasonable health needs to do for fitness, and how. There is no new fad to uncover, nor is the science of it an unknown, complex field.

I'm a lifelong exerciser, and also an academic with interest in, and access to, research, so I tend to read the research about most things I do regularly.

Surprising as it may seem, norms matter, even in the hell that is war.

Condemnation campaigns can and do work, even in conditions where one thinks there are no morals left.

Attention is powerful and can dampen violence even in seemingly worst conditions.

Attention, to a terrorist group, is often what the well-meaning, outraged response is to your two-bit Internet troll: it is the food that feeds them.

Social support is crucial at every stage of life, and too often we are both late to react to threats, and slow to relax restrictions.

The coronavirus is airborne, so stopping its spread requires more focus on ventilation, air filtering and better masks, like N95s or KF94s, or surgical masks, preferably with braces that make them fit better.

Omicron has demonstrated a propensity for superspreading, so places where vulnerable populations live together need to be on high alert.

In a time of information avalanche, focusing on what is true and important can be a revolutionary act.

If you're on Facebook and you're trying to reach out, you really have to figure out how to feed and please its algorithm. If you don't, people aren't going to see your stuff because the algorithm is not going to show it to them.

Lawmakers, sometimes they get surprised by something and they assess it to be powerful even when it's not really signaling that kind of capacity.

I object to the technology as a tool formulation not because it doesn't have some truth in it, but it's more like it's so simplistic that it makes it sound like we can just change our mind and do something else with it and be fine and it doesn't work that way. It has its own power.

If you have a tool like Twitter that gives everybody the ability to speak, but in 140 characters at a time, it's almost inevitable that it's going to encourage some forms of bickering. One-hundred-and-forty characters is prone to misunderstanding. There are real limits to how this thing functions.

Given exponential growth dynamics of infectious diseases, containing an epidemic is straightforward early on, but nearly impossible once a disease spreads among a population.

Protest is the traditional way that Hong Kongers, who do not have full voting rights, express discontent.

Authoritarian blindness is a perennial problem, especially in large countries like China with centralized, top-down administration.

In fact, commercial aviation is so safe because redundancy is mandated by regulation and built into every level, but our commercial-flying experience is so miserable because airlines have made it as efficient as possible to save money.

In many complex systems, efficiency, redundancy, and resiliency pull in different directions: More efficient systems, which are cheaper, eliminate redundancies, which provide resilience but cost more.

In complex systems, one can think about linear interactions and complex or nonlinear interactions.

In 2020, Wuhan may seem remote to Western audiences, but it's a bustling, giant city with more than 500 direct international flights a day, situated in a country that has made great strides in domestic transportation since 2003, with more flights and high-speed train lines.

If some people fly, any virus can get to any country.

Data is immensely appealing to me as a social scientist.

We care deeply, deeply about our social status and signals, and will do just about anything for them. And humans will make anything and everything into social signals.

Humans exist in social groups and rely on social signals to make the group work - signals that are symbolic, and appear without teeth, but in essence are among the most powerful dynamics of a human society.

Technical solutions have to be built around and integrated with social signals, not by stepping on them.

Twitter has made a huge, positive difference in my life, and changed the landscape of politics in multiple countries I studied, including my home country, Turkey.

Our social networks, our news, our mundane existence and our important moments are all mediated by algorithms, whose proprietary, profit-driven, ad-financed nature seeps into every small micro-interaction.

I choose not to block all ads partly because it's useful to my research to see how things work online, and also partly because I thought this had little to no effect on me, personally.

Automated gender analysis of my writings often marks me as male, probably because I write about technology, and also about war. But our algorithmic overlords are onto me: I mostly encounter three types of ads online: weight loss, beauty products, and online degrees from shady for-profits.

Modern shortages of 'labor' are almost always a shortage of willingness to pay well, or a desire to avoid hiring the 'wrong' kind of people.

There are worse things than being exploited, and being redundant and unable to make a living is one of them.

Humans have only so many 'irreplaceable' skills, and the idea that we'll just keep outrunning the machines, skill-wise, is a folly.

When people confidently announce that once robots come for our jobs, we'll find something else to do like we always did, they are drawing from a very short history.

A model's robustness depends on how often it gets tried out and tweaked based on data and its performance.

In our increasingly connected world, every virus is but a hop or two away: almost all humans are close enough to someone who flies - maybe except the isolated tribes in the Amazon.

Pandemics have long been among my favorite topics to teach sociology with, not because the subject is cheery, but because they contain so many of the lessons about our modern world.

Containing Ebola is a no-brainer, and not that expensive. If we fail at this, when we know exactly what to do, how are we going to tackle the really complex problems we face?

What's a soccer mom but a general category that hides great variation?

The secret truth of power of broadcast is that while very effective in restricting limits of acceptable public speech, it was never that good at motivating people individually.

That is the key strength of independent academia: we can speak up in spite of corporate or government interests.

Large corporations exist to sell us things, and to impose their interests, and I don't understand why we as the research/academic community should just think that's totally fine, or resign to it as 'the world we live in.'

Bike-friendly cities provide some of the best quality of life.

Biking is a great way to get around.

I'm all for biking and bikeable cities.

I adored Copenhagen, the city of biking.