They are selling ads on their platform, each one on their own platform, they want to serve the ads for revenue. A fundamental Business Case is underlying the fundamental challenges, and it is so personalized, and is the vectors of dissemination have changed and personalized, the content has changed, targeting individuals with what will work through them with the date of the platforms have accrued and teach one of us over years of use, what did you click on, that tells me something about you and have a correlation to someone, target a lookalike audience or custom audience and running an ad, and reaching people who are predisposed with content means of delivery. That is the base framework. The problem, and years ago the filter bubble became popular the idea that platforms are showing people what they wanted to see and that was creating information silos. When you look at what has to be done, these people are more likely to p predisposed, the platforms are not coming back, people who viewed the content that was targeted a lot of the conversation we have been having is the responsibility of the platform and ask them to act against their own economic interests in the interests of society underlying the hearings, the way the operation was conducted was not unique to one network so you might start the story by getting on that, creating a content farm or a blogger. To make our voices heard and get the information, but i could write something on my blog and post it to readit and to interested people may be they upload it and i do this with tons of content and i see what resonated with the audience i am trying to reach, and the ranking of what is moving up the page, they are endorsing it and take the content that plays well, use an ad campaign to grow an audience but once i have some audience i achieve organic lift. Rather than paying to serve content with somebody each time, hundreds of thousands following my page or join the group sending content out, it is a much larger audience, i have tested the content on redit, perhaps i tested it in a number of platforms to see the reactions of the community and leave it to facebook where i have people begin to do the sharing work for me which brings down the cost, hundreds of thousands of people disseminating my propaganda for free and take it to twitter and what i use twitter for, has much more audience than facebook, twitter has a high concentration of media users and millions of followers, trump has 45 million. At that point i can cost the rubicon, and retweet my article, i can add that point guarantee media coverage, and still in public consciousness, it is a quaint term, using the term Disinformation Campaign or if media doesnt cover it, i can study Conspiracy Theory y media, im going to win either way. This is the way somebody interested in conducting a campaign will do it from strategy and no one responsible for shutting it down, and information sharing. In 2016, interesting hoaxes taking place with regard to the alabama talk about the concept of organic. And what rene was describing, what is the nature of the problem . An important problem, the more technical aspects, on social media, take a small step back and think about the role of the press and journalists, historically a red line, the head of this information. Hands the main target was west germany, close to the targets, listening to them. They talk about them as much as germans do. This line what would be the active measures of the journalists, an integral part of this information and we saw that in 2016 in the us election interference in a new way. Active measures, a bad one from 1960, back in the day, you needed to know they required from an intelligence operator. The industrial scale, a lot of data in the public domain, another front. Journalist and victim society, the victim country in the United States that actually created the value in terms of the damage done, they looked for the journalism nuggets and reported them and ignored this. Any journalist, we certainly understand the risks, the same mistake again, we have to think again, two weeks ago, a little thing happened in germany which is remarkable, two weeks ago, people ran a story about germanys un ambassador, National Security adviser, the un secretarygeneral asking in an improper way to create a job for his wife, shouldnt of done that but the quote from the email, the general secretary chief of staff and the speaker doesnt say where they got the email from. The next day they told the german newspaper wait a minute, we know they explicitly and found the email, and already a couple months prior, and russian intelligence agency. We shouldnt underestimate the rough competitive nature of journalism in a crisis created by these happenings so you have the perfect storm. They feel they have no choice, trending, pushing in, the president talked about it, what can be done and if there is a limit to what the government can do, Civil Society and other measures. Competition is one of the motives, easy to get active measures working in the other one is fear, scarab population, very smart about doing calamitous messages, you hit them with fear and load up a political message likely to fall forward and you see is that with benghazi conspiracies pushed around other things in social media and people would grab them, very few but takes a couple and those with more followers, mavens in social Media Networks spread more quickly, a few things we need to think about. The internet and anonymity, any with regards to social media has the best potential in those with the most resources and worst intentions take control of it. You look at criminals and hackers, what happened to anonymous . Arent they going around the world thinking of transparency . Anybody wonder what happened to those guys . The big and powerful come to learn how these things work and under the rule of law, you dont have to worry about civil liberties, you dont have to worry about free press checking you, you are going to use the system, me and mark, duplicated in a year, all Political Parties do this in the next two or three years. We are seeing this run out. Things we can do, behind social media, there are ways to protect their identity, anonymity, but Public Safety factors. First amendment doesnt protect the right to yell fire in a movie theater. Come pumping conspiracies around jfk has been evacuated, maybe it is a terrorist attack, the truth, where is the truth . It never comes back. People believe the first thing they read, hard to refuse those things that goes well beyond the control of it. How do you deal with the news issue, social Media Companies start Fact Checking, a giant waste of time. I can make fake news faster than you can check it. If you want to stop and artillery barrage you silence begun in to do that you go after, producing this sort of information. We talk about a rating system, nutrition labels for information, it seems like google and facebook with the Media Companies are going through trying to come up with a system to figure out who is doing this, if you are mainstream you are doing 8020 it will hurt you and that would be okay too, journalism and reward for doing Good Journalism over time and this will prevent those fake news outlets that kept popping up from popping up so quickly. We were tracking in the 141516 outlets that pop up in Eastern Europe and talk about how the Federal Reserve is terrible and should be destroyed in the middle of the night. Got to put a metric or challenge on it. It comes down to Public Education around understanding information, got to put it back on the consumer. Dont block the contents, dont squash the outlet. If someone wants to read garbage 90 of the time then fine, like your crazy uncle sends you weird emails all the time and this is a false story. Lets push it back to them and a public that ripped into social media, reading newspapers, people have gone from assisting news from their friends to assessing 1000 inputs a day on social media. This is a mental leap but we are going to fail, everybody falls for fake news yl, we are seeing fake audio, fake video. This will make this more dynamic. We got to inform our public and help them make better decisions on their own and empower themselves, they are not pointing to social Media Companies or politicians or journalists, got to be responsible for their own information consumption and that is what europeans have done, they have been much better about educating the public on it and we are seeing a major shift, looking at france and germany, the reason, a lot of structural reasons consume far less news on social media than they do from traditional news and friends and family. That will change in the next 10 to 20 years, you are seeing the Younger Generation do this. Is superimportant we work on the public for them taking responsibility for themselves, help them understand the dangers, we had this with Consumer Reports in the 70s and 80s, if you buy the chinese import that is 70 cheaper than the good it is competing against it might burn your house down but that is on you. It was your choice to purchase that. Informing the public and help the public make better decisions is something that is good all around. On the nutrition labels are Fact Checking or the ways in which the platforms have asked journalism on the outside to find problems and help them correct that, that feels sort of artisan all, come get a faster more industrial rate. I wonder what ways can the algorithms be used to not Public Education but that back for more Dangerous Things . It is challenging because algorithms are written by people. One thing that comes to mind, facebooks recommendation engine. The recommendation engine as i said earlier is designed to serve you things you want to see you so you stay on facebook. I like a page, specific example, if you are prone to conspiracy thinking the greatest predictor of belief in a conspiracy is belief in a different conspiracy. Welldocumented and psychological literature. If you like a page on chem trails or antivaccine page facebooks organization engine takes an input and begins to serve you contents related to other conspiracies. One thing we saw in late 201516 was facebooks recommendation engine recommending pete thegate, that Hillary Clinton ran a vast underground sex ring to antivaccine and chemtrail believers. It is taking people believing in pseudoscience and healthrelated conspiracy theories and pushing them down the rabbit hole into antigovernment conspiracy theories or other bizarre, 9 11 was a hoax, that kind of thing, the weird intersection because the recommendation engine is serving that kind of people. An interesting problem because from a facebook business standpoint it is giving people what they want to see but conversations along the valley, the ethical design, choice architecture, you dont give people, show them the donuts first, you read the donuts, serve the salad, to make the choices better for that standpoint so what are the unintended consequences of the algorithms, how are we thinking about what we have created and might we make more ethical decisions that do not negatively affect profits but do things that are better for people. That is the undercurrent, it is not censorship did not suggest this content. If someone wants to go to facebook and type in pizzagate, that is facebooks decision to decide what remains in its platform under First Amendment protections are information sharing but when you make the decision to serve something up, that is a proactive action by a platform that gets into an area where we could see the platforms make design decisions that could have powerful impact. A design decision, the twitter abuse, wondered why we have not done this, some of you may remember when twitter had egg profile pictures by default, usually eggs didnt provide interesting content so you could opt out of eggs for a wild. I dont want people in my feed still have an egg picture, that was possible for a while. Now why is it not possible to opt out of both . If you can opt out of eggs why not out of box traffic . They claimed in the hearing several times that they have sophisticated Machine Learning mechanisms in place that can recognize bots. Why dont they give you the opportunity to click a box and have normal box traffic . They would then cut down their active user base by a significant order of magnitude. The notion of opt in versus opt out outside of the Digital World and Organ Donation this, make them decide not to participate versus making them check the box, the same with bots. With twitter the blue checkmark accounts, a verification marker, i was scrolling through the new settings and turn off lowquality accounts, oh my goodness, in development the entire time. They havent sent the lowquality account and it used to be only for famous people, celebrities and famous people the opportunity to not see them for years and that is a decision rather than creating this experience for everyone, took years to get to the idea that maybe people would want to opt out of but content. Lets open it up for questions. This is on the record. Speak directly into it. State your name and affiliation. Jill doherty i dont care who answers it but this controversy of having artie and student register as foreign agents, protect americans from propaganda by the nazis, whether that type of law has any relevance today because how can you protect people against something every minute is coming into their box from one account or another. Is that obsolete and what is your opinion, to register as foreign agents. It is great that they did that. This has happened quite a bit, in 2015 i was receiving russia propaganda from friends arguing with me that i didnt know what i was talking about, i am glad in missouri you dont know what rt is, okay. People dont assess sources because you trust friends and family more than you trust someone else. Part of rts methodology which was brilliant is we cant beam in Satellite Television but we can put stuff on youtube and have supporters with likeminded people, by the time it moves along you dont know where it came from and this is part of the problem, they will just say it is all propaganda, your propaganda, nbc, cnn, it is all propaganda, very much the russian world of information in russia, your pr, there pr. We locked that bearing about reporting versus opinion, impact versus fiction, that has gone sideways. As propaganda helps the public, i dont think they will know they had to register and when they receive it, appealing to preferences they go to consume it and do that because theres awareness, this is a statesponsored news outlet from around the world, see that with all authoritarian regimes, as long as it is happy they will keep filling their belly with what you keep feeding them on social media. And that is the formula, content dissemination. From the security, tech communities do survey research from marketing and Public Diplomacy a decade ago to work on these issues. And it looks professional and persuasive, and the best pr agencies, one question is limit to one question. Would it make sense to oblige American Companies professionally assisting operations. We havent put boundaries around, active measures work, three parts. Great success too but took much longer. The other parties russians have figured out too much information is worse than no information. They have taken the envelope and opened it up and saturated, gone from we will try to control all information to i will bomb you with so much information you dont know what is true or false. The other part of why it works is there is enough economic openness that you can actually run a ground lever along with the virtual. This is what americans miss, we love our social media, the reason it works, they take physical things, realworld things, facts, and use that to manipulate truth or other falsehoods to push the conspiracy. They are physical actors. They have physical partners that are also helping them. If we are going to be upset about this influence we have to look at how to characterize agencies like that, starting to break up our democracy, that is starting to happen. It is such a level that we how much closer to real breaks in the United States than people understand at this point. If you have someone doing that kind of stuff the question will be what if us companies are doing it on behalf of the United States overseas . It is a 2 way street. The policy question is supercomplicated. I would add a cautionary note. One of the things that makes this country so great and attractive for the rest of the world is the First Amendment and the strength of the First Amendment. I start wrestling with the notion, it is hostile. Crossing a line somewhere. One of the lines that have been drawn on foreign interference, different from foreign speech but you are right to draw that. We are talking about an attack on the United States, and information attack, information about that attack, what ultimately will come out his counter influencing, the us wont do much of anything so you have to pool a different strategic lever against an adversary. The us should never repeat what we have done to it to another country. I would be very upset if we hacked into peoples emails in any country on the internet. I dont want to see false journalism stories which i have seen that nonsense in the last week in the news, planting of news stories, discrediting outlets. I would be upset with our country if we do it. There are several things we should do against russia if we want to go on a counterattack but not to do their playbook back against them. It undermines our values, hurts us as a country, violates free speech and with that my answer of yes was we suffered a major information break that affect our elections and there are people who dont feel their vote counted. We have to come up with a response. We have to move on. Smith group. It appears to me we are going to be more deliberate in our education system, more critical thinkers, how do you recommend we improve the public system, i dont believe this is helping the situation. Doing Public Education, going in a weird direction, went to Public School in high school and college, military academy, one of the classes in the Intelligence Community is evaluating and superhelpful for me when i had it. There are times to water that down for a high school curriculum, supervaluable, and sweden has done this which is helping people understand or think about ways to evaluate Information Service without going into political biases. The delivery of education services. Italy put out a curriculum for this. Dont know if you remember, i remember subliminal advertising. Studies later said was not a big tip but we are educated about that. Austin, the discussion of education, First Amendment, freespeech, raises the issue instead of focusing on educating the public about evaluating information we should reemphasize teachings of values that make america great, and fundamental principles. What we dont hear is promotion in the us of First Amendment and due process and constitutional, and teaching civic education, that is what we need to reemphasize, a reasonable appreciation of information. The european countries, i think is absolutely unreal, i watched the olympics, in charlottesville, chanting russia is their friends, the weirdest transition. One of the most fundamental, the discussion to be had about this. Twitter, the same intuition, they should not be able to delete tweets because they are Public Record. 16yearold hootsuites something stupid should be able to delete. How do you reconcile them . A fascinating question we should pay more attention to. One of the things we were arguing for, twitter data, if it is deleted you should no longer use it. Which is why during the head of the hearing twitter compiled and released the account, and the talent researching, vested interest, doing things like this, the privacy rights, the justification for the right to be forgotten and 16yearolds deleting her tweet, personal privacy, manipulative accounts is ludicrous to think we are giving privacy considerations to fake people but that is the state of the conversation today. David ensor of the gw product for media National Security. My question right now on the topic of this panel, can we trust facebook, google and others to get the problem that emerged in the last election under some kind of control . At what stage does there need to be recognition of social Media Companies, and platforms being used to change the results of elections . Something we havent talked about, where the threat is coming from, not just russia but different, what social media platforms, what should government be doing . Market promoted regulation, users get very angry and inspire companies to change their behavior to keep users happy, something the media, selfregulation, consortium of industry, something worth their time and much longer and i dont think it will happen by 2018 which is a source of major concern for people who Pay Attention to this problem. We saw with isis a few years back, russia is not the first time the firms had disinformation and propaganda problem, took several years to get Tech Companies to come under this Global Internet forum, and speak to it but this was about three years from identification of the problem and request that something be done to this organization being stood up to do something. In many ways we will be dependent on media researchers, people putting out like we are seeing the campaign in alabama, we need to get this story out and have twitter responding to researchers rather than diminishing the work independents are doing. So bots and abuse is threat to facebook business modeling, facebook is ultimately about human account, and facebook is trying to tackle the problem and resources, they made the right moves, getting a lot of bad press for it. Bots are not a threat, they are helping because they make it appear larger but from twitter we expect the opposite. I would not be surprised if some twitter engineers literally left twitter and moved to facebook. Twitter deserves a lot more attention and criticism then it is getting. I would highlight a thing that i put in plain english and use an analogy. Imagine the New York Times decides we should give our readers the ability to unpublished letters to the editor from our website, fair enough . Twitter is doing something else, saying we should give readers the ability to unpublished letters to the editor. That is not okay. If we have something on Public Record from people who have chosen to put something on Public Record, they shouldnt be able to remove the record from nonpublic, the effectiveness they make as a result. How many make this a little how many retweets they cant receive when tweeting about russia, how many are actually boughts versus human beings . Retweets or likes . It is an uncomfortable answer, we dont know. Maybe twitter doesnt even know and couldnt find out. What are the policies . Public education, nutrition labels. I dont really see in terms of regulation for policy, focusing on elections and politics and the standard for advertising should be the same in social media, that will help inform the public to make better choices what they are consuming, they know what the ad is, the other parties political groups repeatedly use russian disinformation and social media over and over again, they know we are emotional and we want to win, not going to hold for social Media Companies to figure it out. They are there to provide service and when bad things start to happen i expect them to move forward and try to make corrections, and and it took 12 short years, very low confidence. And and there have been times i have gone to social Media Companies that pay, thousands of disinformation accounts, we dont care, Machine Learning, figure it out, and looking at the state board or whatever. That arrogance has gone away over the last we 10 years and has become okay, i need to understand threats like terrorism or disinformation and they got to pair that with technologies, that happened at google, and continues to expand that out. They dont cover every issue in the world, who is the person covering me on marr . This just emerged, they want to go after people who study these issues and understand the problems and put Machine Learning and technologies along with it, that used to be what my job was in the terrorism center, pairing industry and Research Academics to come up with solutions, ultimately this comes down to leadership. Our country has to decide and doesnt have to be, what do we want our world to be like, just imagine this in 2020. Everyone adopts, every Political Campaign adopt the russian playbook and uses it on social media. Im not talking about a foreign influence operation, every country in the world saying you know what to happen in america . The following, boughts ads, doing it on scale, ads domestic Political Parties. Every candidate, guess who is going to lose . If you think you will run for an election as a person who is a schoolteacher, a 20,000 job, your job, run for elected office in the United States against day but machine and Political Campaign you are insane. This will become just those that have the resources, those that have a time can manipulate and ship information, i talk about russia a lot and is this the world you want to live in where it is a cacophony of noise from social media . A lot of americans will walk away, they will be apathetic and say i dont want to participate in this. Woman in the back . Bookings institution. Your idea on labeling, this has been discussed in a lot of areas, and tell something, that will change their behavior. There is no evidence for this. It is compelling when it comes to actual nutritional labeling. They know there are 2000 cal. People making the decision on the consumer. This is what i want can i challenge you on this . The consumer response in the nutritional world there are federal agencies that regulate not just nutritional contents but products that have hazards to human life. Wouldnt we need a similar agency to implement and punish, and. And rating systems. And will someone buy the product. Absolutely, it is 5. I wanted to is not trying to win over the whole world but i want people and this puts up 70 false information, and 10 truth. This is where the outlet is based on. It is an outlet that is based in bulgaria that suddenly popped up 6 months ago. Are you aware of that . You want to they are informed, gives them that information, that will chip away. No doubt about it, look at rotten tomatoes, that is another one. Actors are complaining they get before anybody comes out, they are not getting a chance, reverses on itself. It is not just about putting nutrition label on it but telling people here is what sources have been putting out versus opinion, fact versus falsehoods, now you make your own decision, that is what i want. One is more transparency, obviously that is important, to be somebody they are not. When you buy a newspaper in the analog days do you know something about the newspaper when you pick it up . Yes. You have it physically in your hand. You get duped by news that is shared with you because who does it come from . Your family and friends, people you trust so you take trust to your family and friends on your social media piece over the actual outlets out there. You are not assessing the outlet, your assessing the story. I want them to assess the outlet, not just what they are getting from family or friends was i went them to go my family and friends have strong opinions and look at good news sources but i will also assess the information sources. The nutrition label, seems like there are efforts to work with Fact Checkers like snopes and others with assessment whether or not an outlet tends to produce disinformation and fake news. They are trying to do that. Those are the most recent stories so there are a couple things. One thing is platforms keep costs down in their business to automate things. Anytime you have a human component, relying in part on people reporting things but mass reporting, you have people deciding i dont like this thing but pages calling to action members saying got to report this story, something unfavorable about it so it turns into a nightmare of one army of opinions, on amazon, hasnt been written as widely, the battle for reviews which is the new fao, in search Search Engine optimization, little tricks that make your website rank on the first page, we see it all over amazon. Things from the first page, doing everything through the first page, millions of dollars of revenue or not. And algorithms to identify instances where people say i will send an email and ask everyone to do that, a big problem. If there is a crowd source elements it is being manipulated and it is interesting because we crowdsourcing would be a magical way for people to participate, take the wisdom of the crowd and turn that into serving the best content, the best product, things you needed to see but this is the problem with algorithmic manipulation, manufacturing consensus, gathering people together, creates a false notion how popular something is, product or story or person and hundreds of thousands of followers, people just dig in. I was going to say they have to at this point take it on themselves to say we will have an opinion, hire internal people and cannot relegate this task to crowdsourcing on the assumption. I dont want it to be crowd sourced. One of the councils we have to end on, make sure we honor that, but fleshed out a lot of challenges and continue the conversation how to move forward because of these solutions. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]