Alexios Mantzarlis

Hi! I am currently the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech. I am also the author of Faked Up.

I care about online information quality as a fundamental pre-requisite for healthy public discourse.

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From August 2019 to May 2023, I worked for Google. As a principal on the Trust & Safety Intel team, I helped product teams fight the scourge of involuntary synthetic pornographic imagery and launched a new adversarial red team focusing on content risks from generative AI. As a manager on the product policy team for Google Search, I led content policy for factual accuracy and high promise answers, including Search's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In my first role at Google as the News and Information Credibility Lead, I drove efforts to highlight fact checks to users in product (1, 2, 3), and share information on their reach. I was also responsible for initiatives supporting the fact-checking ecosystem’s response to the COVID-19 infodemic (1, 2). My blog post with tips to spot misinformation was featured on the Google homepage globally for International Fact-Checking Day in 2021.

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From February to July 2019 I was a TED fellow researching whether the public can be meaningfully included in decision-making about information quality on the major platforms.

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From September 2015 to February 2019, I was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), the global coalition of fact-checking projects. In 2022, the Former Minister of Culture and Equality of Norway Trine Skei Grande nominated the IFCN for the Nobel Peace prize.

As Director of the IFCN, I  helped draft the fact-checkers' code of principles, shepherded a seminal partnership between fact-checkers and Facebook, testified to the Italian Chamber of Deputies on the "fake news" phenomenon and helped launch International Fact-Checking Day.  I also organized the annual Global Fact-Checking Summit, the premier conference on the topic.

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I previously served as Managing Editor of Pagella Politica, Italy's main political fact-checking website. While at Pagella Politica, I got to present weekly fact-checking segments on Virus, a prime time talk show airing on the national broadcaster RAI 2. I have also worked for the United Nations, the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, the Office of Prime Minister Mario Monti, and the consulting firm Ambrosetti.

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My expertise has been recognized by several international institutions. In 2018 I was invited to join the European Union's High Level Group on fake news and online disinformation and to draft a lesson plan for UNESCO. 

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My publications include a chapter on fact-checking in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections in Truth Counts, a study on Zika and fake news published by the American Journal of Health Education, and another study on the mission and priorities of fact-checking sites published by Political Quarterly.

I have been quoted extensively on media outlets around the world including Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, BBC, Folha de S. Paulo, Le Monde, NPR and The Washington Post.