Malicious propaganda and fake news so how and why a platform such as Facebook Google and twitter so wide open to abuse in a two part special report we sent paul babe sounds to investigate. San francisco and Silicon ValleyTech Companies driving the digital revolution see themselves as positive agents of political and social change facebooks mission is all about giving people a voice and bring people closer together those are Democratic Values and were proud of googles mission store going to growth information and make it universally accessible and useful the more you learn about technology the more you learn whats possible. At the winter park and. If we want to see a democracy its up to us to make sure that we have our giving better. Russias manipulation of these platforms during the two thousand and sixteen u. S. President ial election has raised fundamental questions about their systemic vulnerabilities do you solemnly swear to tell the truth last november the companies were summoned to appear before the Us Senate Intelligence committee thats right its not new russians have been conducting Information Warfare for decades but what is know is the advent of social media tools with the power to magnify propaganda and fake news on a scale that was unimaginable back in the days of the berlin wall youve created these platforms and now they are being misused and you have to be the ones to do something about it or we will what youre doing by allowing this fake stuff to come across this misleading this damaging information is threatening the security and it really is softening of our nation i wish you c. E. O. s would be here they need to ask answer for this after repeated pressure from Congress Facebook disclosed last september that four hundred seventy fake accounts link to a shadowy company with ties to the kremlin the Internet Research agency had spent some hundred thousand dollars to purchase more than three thousand ads most on divisive hot button issues this company. To protect his cause and included post many would characterize as anti immigration oriented most of the russian sponsored Facebook Page heart of texas attracted nearly two hundred fifty four thousand followers part of texas group created a public event on facebook to occur at the Islamic Center in Houston Texas to stop the islamization of texas russian operatives also created a page for united muslims of america a real group whose name they commandeered to promote a counter protest at the Islamic Center. But neither side could have known is that russia. Were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create divisions between real americans causing list disruptive event in houston cost russia about two hundred dollars. The russians created more than one hundred Facebook Pages to exacerbate social divisions in the u. S. There were pages for africanamerican groups and police advocates southern nationalists and liberal activists. Supporters and christian fundamentalists army of jesus and other russian pages ran anti Hillary Clinton ads during the election each of these fake accounts spend literally months developing networks of real people to follow and like their content these networks are later utilites to push and to write this information. The day before the hearing facebook revealed that russian content used as many as one hundred twenty six million americans twitter found more than thirty six thousand russian accounts that generated one point four million election related tweets seen almost three hundred million times and google disclosed that russian trolls likely posted eleven hundred videos on eighteen new to. This is a yes or no question do you believe that any of your companies have identified the full scope of russian active measures on your platform said our investigation to. To news so i would have to say no certainly not with certainty right now and were still working. On a comprehensive investigation but these are ongoing issues and we continue to invest again we are relying on Twitter Facebook and google to find and reveal this information and its been dropping out so i think we have a long way to go before we know the full story seed of idea nothingness director of the center for media and citizenship at the university of virginia the author of the google ization of everything his new book and the social media will be released this year russian interference is alarming but the biggest effect that social media have on the prospect of democracy has to do with undermining our ability as citizens to think and act. Effectively and collectively. Why do you think the world is in the midst of an internet assault on democracy since two thousand and eleven what we have seen is the rise of oratory and leaders often elected in places like poland like hungary like india like the philippines and google and facebook and twitter have all been used by these forces and then in my own country donald trump laid almost all of his hopes on a facebook based campaign late two thousand and seventeen facebook reached almost two point two billion people thats stunning and if you were to design a communicate of system a propaganda system for nationalist forces for anti Muslim Forces for authoritarian forces you could not build a better platform than facebook. We set out to investigate why Facebook Twitter and google are such powerful tools for malicious actors who want to spread disinformation and undermine peoples faith and democracy the first stop was in Silicon Valley to meet with the cofounders a blitz metrics dennis you and logan young they teach social Media Marketing their own Advertising Campaigns on facebook for the n. B. A. Champ Golden State Warriors and more than one hundred other clients. Facebook is the worlds most powerful and sophisticated targeting platform it is a database instead of a social Network Facebook sorts its users characteristics into hundreds of categories making it easy for advertisers to target people with great precision and you dont have to be a statistics expert you can just click on a few buttons and the system will do the work for you in two thousand and sixteen the trunk campaign spent most of its hundred Million DollarDigital Advertising budget on facebook you when young demonstrated how facebook could have been used to reach Blue Collar Workers in michigan a state that usually goes democratic but that trump won by less than eleven thousand votes. I can do based off income you know if i know average blue Collar Worker makes fifty two hundred k. So i could say people that are conservative are very conservative they can be a. F. L. Cio members they could be against immigration and theres all these other issues that we can block it and here we can even put in labor union or the United Auto Workers right if you have the kind of content thats directly relevant to that particular group such as the u. S. Auto industry isnt as strong as it used to be so this is the facebook has brought together from many different sources not just their political thats right we have this information of your membership we have your zip data we have if youve made that donation and we know the kinds of products that youre buying in the supermarket everything that youre doing that doesnt involve cash usually makes its way to facebook the most powerful capability facebook provides comes from combining its data with out of advertisers them so so think about the Trump Campaign they have all of the information of people that are making donations they upload that to facebook and facebook and say im going to find friends of people that have donated and then i can combine that with the other day that were showing and say how many of those people are also in michigan and are also over thirty five and are also working in detroit and are let you know laid off at the ford plant and you can also text the messages that work most effectively with groups yes then you can spend just pennies to be able to see how theyre working and then showed how a small amount of money spent promoting a clients video resulted in millions of views and i can see here we spent five hundred six dollars and for that we got to reach ninety four thousand and ninety four thousand times showed up on someones feed but it has over twenty nine million views and the reason is the shares this is been shared four hundred twenty two thousand times so really what you want to do when you buy it is generated shares at exactly it the russians are really good at pushing incendiary content that people will just have to engage and have to share the russians device of content one hundred. Twenty six million americans on facebook according to the company but you point out the ads were seen over and over again by the same people who appear in the news feeds hundreds of millions of times and do you think that these hundreds of millions of impressions. Maybe maybe not was it in michigan or florida or places that close i dont really know but what i do know is that theyre saying how effective facebook is and how we can microtargeting how its great for advertisers that are selling furniture and cars at the same time you dont think the hundred million impressions on facebook cant create an impact on an election you cant have that both ways of course facebook can influence elections like we used to joke about how you throw an election using various tools at facebook which facebook actually could do. And Tony Martinez worked at facebook from two thousand and eleven to two thousand and thirteen and played a central role in developing facebooks micro targeting system. Responsibility there was a product manager for ads targeting which meant basically turning all your user data into money for facebook what role do you think facebook played in selection i mean political pundits get things wrong all the time right but a well trained Machine Learning algorithm trained on good data doesnt often come up with the wrong answer and i spent years Building Tools to basically defeat human reason or human error you know dominate human tastes its very weird but dont you think that can be a real problem when used as political candidates in their messages rather than Consumer Products right now i think politics are somewhat different right at the end of the day our democracy and our political system depends on it and thats frankly more important than selling a pair of shoes like no question right martinez is much more concerned about the way facebook encourages people to live inside their own echo chamber which is also called the filter bubble to me the bigger issue that i really dont see a solution for is the sort of filter bubble slash fake news problem right where you know citizens used to have a right to an opinion and now they have a right to their own reality you know facebook flatters their vision of the world. And theyre never forced to challenge their assumptions you know they can go off in some rabbit hole of untruth they spokes mission is to give people what they want in their news feed and executive provide an orientation through that message home to martin is on his first day of work he had this very sweeping vision of you know the New York Times of you in fact the accident from a question is like what is facebook you know sometime in turn said oh its often i was like no wrong right it is your personalized newspaper they basically feed you anything that you engage with by engage means likes comments share etc like their news feed algorithm is optimized to that facebook recently announced changes to its news feed that will prioritize posts from friends and news from sites that users rate is trustworthy but the changes could reinforce filter bubbles and do little to stem the spread of bogus news why is it so easy to disseminate fake news on facebook. I think it all comes down to you know what psychologists call cognitive dissonance right views of the world that flatter your worldview you just eat up like candy or french fries and just cant get enough of it and thats thats why fake news is so effective because if the world as youd like to see it rather than it actually is today more than two thirds of americans get news on social media you think facebook is contributing to the polarization you know. But i dont think anyone had any notion that we would reach a level where its reached today which you have democracies that basically cant function but i mean kind of democracy in which you and i can agree on the ground truth values and realities if we dont have that then how do we form consensus around a policy goal how do we solve it its not its problems. Information about those exist but the breadth of information that an average person today holds. The largest in history. He is a psychologist at stanford who did Pathbreaking Research and what you can tell about people from facebook likes we just look at likes that people have not we actually the algorithm can take likes from your profile your facebook profile and would be able to very accurately reveal your psychological traits your political views your sexual interrogation your. Ethnicity. What are you take drugs or not a number of other sensitive and intimate things. Thinks the upside of using these new psychographic profiling techniques in politics far away is the downside making it possible for politicians to adjust their message in such a way as to make it relevant to people its great because it increases in the gauge went of people in politics its great for the northwest but people can be engaged because a very narrow issues and who gauge meant within a narrow political point of view is not necessarily good for democracy is social networks are a great advantage a great boon to them democracy anyone can become a blogger anyone can become a publisher well on one hand it brings us all of those people that says not real things but on the other hand it protects us from governments or powerful individuals or corporations dominating the Communication Channels but the algorithms are channeling to the things you really want to see so in some sense that undermines any sense of truth or a common reality in which people can talk and try to work out policy together you know theres data that exists that shows that humans always this is just human nature we always occupied our own echo chamber as we always occupy the universe of me now today. Thanks to repeat the recommendation systems those universes of us of me and you are the largest universes we ever had and theyre also overlapping to a great extent. I think the effect of the filter bubble has yet to be quantified and im willing to render a hypothesis that when we get decent full assessment of the a fact of filter bubbles it will be different among different groups and different people how have social media platforms affected political discourse social media platforms have divided us have made a shallower you know the very addictive nature of it interferes with our ability to dive deep into one tax interferes with our ability to speak face to face in any depth. And perhaps to come to some sort of mutual awareness of the brain as you know it it does structure our habits of thoughts in ways that are not healthy for living life in a complex world and living in a democracy i think that the spread of junk news in this information and social media platforms as undermined truth in a sense if youre reading and learning about the world through facebook what youre getting is a mixture of traditional quality journalism and completely out there completely made up stories that look like journalism youre going to have a really hard time distinguishing what is true and what is not. And if you are of the mind that you would like to undermine our ability to think about facts and coherently argue about policy youre going to turn to social media to get your word out there to mess with people to frustrate people to confuse people. Because Nothing Better has ever been invented. Larry kim an Online Marketing consultant so it is just how easy it is to spread this information on facebook who is troubled by all the fake news sites that power. During the two thousand and sixteen president ial election last october he ran a test to see a facebook and address the problem he took us through the steps of his experiment wanted to know if facebook had close the loopholes and the whole effort took less than an hour so first thing that i did was create a fake news website basically to disseminate fake stories so my blog i decided to go with the name citizens and News Networks the story that i used was actually a very famous fake a story about a doll trump a protester who was saying that he was paid thirty five hundred dollars to protest a trump rally and i was from the election yeah you can see this is a really ridiculous looking site it doesnt seem very authority of it in any way i did this intentionally because i wanted to see all the facebook kind of Fake News Police you know be able to kind of catch this this little civil hack in the act then what did you do well so the next thing you need to do is set up a Facebook Page for my fake website and thats really easy to do and takes you know one or two minutes so if you want to promote a fake news and facebook they dont check it all when you say i know i. Know absolutely absolutely that they dont check i was claiming to be a media outlet but you know that was all self declared information and then i just simply shared the big news article to my fake news Facebook Page and now were almost in business here you know step three we need to see to promote this story to to an audience. You know using facebook ads to boost exposure of his fake article in Facebook News feed him spend fifty three dollars on a socalled engagement brews experiment targeted people in three swing states key to trump to victory michigan pennsylvania and wisconsin i went with a demographic that is very likely to eat this stuff so for example people who are. Republicans who are members of the National RifleAssociation People who do need to conservative causes after he selected the groups he wanted to target he clicked on the boost post button you know i just want to get caught i want somebody at facebook to shut this down and say like you know this is a violation of some terms but keep in mind facebook is an advertising business and the ad was approved within minutes so what happened did you immediately start getting people posting to it or reacting to it the reaction was bonkers like people were clicking on it and commenting on it and sharing on it and liking it like crazy within an hour about five thousand people sought. For for fifty bucks that doesnt happen that often you know i have companies that are spending orders of magnitude more than than than fifty bucks and they can drive this type of thing gauger and what did you take away from doing this experiment my takeaway is this is appalling that fake news threatens undermine our system of government so its very concerning that you know people can still do this a year later after after the election what do you think can be done to address this pretty obvious first step is there should be some kind of an application process you know like just like when you sign up for a credit card you know its kind of a validation of advertisers to verify who they are and if they are real or not. Facebook declined our request for an interview it pains us as a company and then our platform was abused in this way Facebook Google and twitter and each announced the propriety of measures to deal with this information these include tweaks to algorithms political ad disclosure increased Security Staffing and review of articles by outside Fact Checkers facebooks approach to Fact Checking is actually not doing people think that content throughout the site is being checked because theyre seeing some disputed tax. And thats just not true. Robin kaplan is a scholar at the data and Society Research institute she focuses on policy to deal with this information and propaganda on social media platforms do you think baseball twitter and google can address the problems of dissent from ation over their platforms without fundamentally changing their economic model no i dont these are private companies that create two challenges because firstly they are driven by their own goals and incentives that need to align with their Business Model things like clicks likes and shares are the metrics that are used to prioritize or d. Prioritize content because thats how ad revenue is based but those signals dont actually tell us much about whether or not that content is truthful or important or more valuable do you think the companies can really solve a lot of the problems by tweaking their algorithms i dont think algorithms are actually going to fix this problem is Companies Need to start hiring on Editorial Staff and journalists people who have been located within the traditions of the news media to start informing some of the decisions that Platform Companies are making in reviewing content what do you think of the companys argument that if they take a greater role in curating content its going to lead to censorship we can develop processes to make sure that they are not censoring content arbitrarily so i think we need to start having a conversation about whether or not they should be held to a higher standard of norms and values that weve had with print or radio or cable i think its time for platforms to step up to the plate and accept the responsibility that their Media Companies that theyre not neutral Technology Companies heres the ironic thing great people say facebook has too much power so as a reaction they want facebook to assume more power by actually potentially censoring or editing content on their platform as a former employee im not sure that i want facebook becoming the editor in chief to the world series papers im actually not a big fan of that solution do you think social media platforms can deal with the problem. Of echo chambers and fake news without undermining their economic model in a way theres nothing they can do about it and b. The companies they are zara i think thats right thats right. But one thing that might change is i think people might get just more savvy right they might understand it theyre looking at fake news i mean in some sense like every every new technology is characterized by in the initial period of discovery being used by the criminals or roads or you know for various negative for negative outcomes and so i think were going through social media of growing pains right now its too early to tell but i dont think that that that society adjust to these its like in germany in the one nine hundred thirty s. Radio and film became powerful instruments of propaganda. They were the chosen instruments of gavels of hitler and they worked beautifully for them after World War Two we confronted the fact that propaganda was dangerous we had a fervent public conversation about it we had commissions devoted to it in order to deliver solid dependable information so no we havent adjusted the technology weve just gotten lucky we have managed to manage through the use of competition the celebration of multiple voices through the practice of consensus but i fear that that consensus is breaking down when that consensus breaks down our front again gets stronger. In the next continuing episode of the special reports how russia and the extreme right to use alternate social media accounts numbers boats to spread disinformation and propaganda. Its like the wild west they can do anything and the really hard for them to get the powerful internet is the tool for democracy under threat. Voices and they distort the debate in the echo Chamber World of fake news in cyberspace the rules of the game have changed there are no precedents people and out investigate disinclination and democracy part two at this time on aljazeera the nature news as it breaks the us funding has cemented the failing that the us. And its. Detailed coverage. Of the release of the girls and hundreds of others. From around the world. Are still thinking about abuses but this time. From Satellite Technology to three d. Printing. Africa is transforming young innovators change Building Communities creating employment and solving problems challenging systems and shaping. Creative thinkers shaping continents future innovate africa. Hello im down with a quick reminder the top stories here at aljazeera a russian fighter jets been shot down by rebels of a syrias northwest and province Russias Defense Ministry says the pilot my