Information dissemination. [inaudible conversations] can we have everyone sit down, please . Thanks. Thank you. Hi. Welcome to the second session of todays sim pose yuck. This titled combating online information operations. Im karen, senior fellow for digital policy and were lucky of the hes experts to discuss this issue. Renee, thomas, and clint. I anticipate a very lively and fascinating conversation. Want to start with thomas. When the Supreme Court decided Citizens United it predicated the whole idea that corporations should be able to spend my in elects because the internet, which was then seen as this great engine of transparency and democracy, the arab spring was going on the internet would be full transparency to american elections, and that was the magic bullet. And at the time i was in the obama administration. We were really taken with the idea of internet freedom, but it seems that since then the openness of the internet, which we hoped would solve a lot of political problems, undernine authoritarian governments, is almost being used to undermine democracy by some authoritarian governments. Can you give us a little history about information operations, what have we been missing and what do we need to pay more attention. To. Yeah. Thank you. I am happy to try to provide some history. Im writing a book on the history of disinformation right now so please stop me if i start to get into too much detail there disinformation or active now use the sold soviet term of art, which emerged in early 60s is a very old phenomenon, and if we go look at the cold war, we literally have hundreds more likely thousands of examples of small individual active measures and disinformation operations. I interviewed a few people who actually worked in active measures for their entire career. You may be able to hear in my funny accent, im german, so i initially interviewed some an disinformation operator which was extraordinary, and from one of them i have this they thought the best mix between truth and fact, truth and lie, is 8020, 80 true, 20 false. That makes it really hard for journalists or experts like us to tell what is actually true and what is factual and what is not factual. So lets make an example of a particularly vicious operation from the year 1960. That was revealed in a congressional hearing in mid1980s. In 1960, this is the context is decolonization, and many african countries, newly independent, wondering whether they should join the west or the soviet bloc. And in that context sudden lay pamphlet appeared, 16 page cam met appeared in 15 different african countries, in french as well as english, and the pamphlet contained pictures and text, and it was about tight upped to our dear friends it and was on the face of it written by an African American in the United States, an africanamerican organization to africans in africa, explaining to them the true ugly face of American Culture at home it and was full of racial discrimination, lynchings, in the south, Police Violence against africanamericans. I checked and went through the press reports at the time, and almost every single detail in those 16 pages is completely accurate, down to very gruesome details wont repeat here. But this is an example of an techtive measure that was a real headache for to state department. Very difficult to counter because it was based in truth. But at the same time, under a false cover of a nonexistent organization. So its just one of literally hundreds of examples that i think highlights some methods of operation that we still see today. So, clint, you have been talking about how the u. S. Has to respond for quite some time, and we see that some other western democracies, there is a response to the information operations. Can you talk at bit about what seems to be working, what might be interesting models . I dont know that anything is working yet. There is some progress. Theres the defense and then theres the sort of countering portion. The europeans get it because theyve been in this game much longer than the United States. Theres the twopart failure in the United States with russian meddling witch didnt understand that hacks were being used for influence, we looked at is as investigations. The second part was this was already going on in Eastern Europe, ukraine, places like that it. Brexit, didnt think it would happen in the United States. We were arrogant to this, it would never come to our shores. Theyre more in the trenches on this. Theyve been dealing with it for a long time. The number one thing they have done over probably a 50year period is called education weapon dont invest in is the same way here but they very much put forward what their sentence is stance is on information and what they deal with. The otherring this theyve started to go ahead and acknowledge when these untruths are being leveraged toward them and in some places czech republic, latvia is out front. I was at the launch in hell sin can i of the hell sin can i of the Hubert Center they but together. They have different audiences. You want to understand russian active measures, its about language, not necessarily about culture, because thats howl you communicate in social media. If you want to track and influence campaign you need to look at the language theyre using and theyre narrating. What is interesting with those countries as opposed to our own is the basic rule youre taught in boxing, dont punch back until your feet are thousand ground. They understand what it want anywhere country and what theyre defend and what their policies are and then counter the influence narrative. We have failed in this for a decade, whether its terrorist or the russian disinformation, and our counterinfluence because we dont really know what we believe in and dont note what we stand for. You cannot counter back, whether its online or on the ground, a counterinfluence campaign unless you know what your nations policies are, what your Belief Systems are and what youre going to push back with. I outcome lee cold war, whether european or here at home, we prodemocracy, nationalists, things we were trying to advance around the world. Right now, i am not sure that the russian message is different than our own here at home. So you cant do counterinfluence or counteractive measures until theres some consensus at whom what we believe here and defend and promote overseas. The narrative around the election weasand eu, antinato, lets Work Together to kill isis, be a nationalist, not a globalist, you first, the world second. How do we counter senate sounds pretty familiar. Just to im just saying in terms of you cannot move forward. The way the europeans are moving forward is even in their own countries they have a baseline from which theyre standing in their counterinfluence campaigns, and they have some consensus around it. They know who is in charge. I dont think we have that here. We got rid of the u. S. Information agency so both structurally and in terms of message, theyre much more grounded and can punch back. Just to pick up on that. One thing ive heard people talk about its just so much easier to be negative. Right. If youre about tearing down a nihilist, east er to get your message couple as if youre in favor of something. Youre saying there has been some success and people have a better ability to articulate about democracy. Not just about democracy, might using the nationalist message in europe, its us first and not our adversary, but they have clear way of communicating to their public can both from a leadership privilege and through their media and public affairs, where they communicate finland, sweden, scanned da navan countries are great examples they communicate to the public clearly, this is what we stand for what and what we believe in. A positive message . Just antirussian. Right. Its nationalist and also about their values. Our biggest challenge right now it will be coming up on the fouryear mark the first time talked about in government audiences, late spring, summer of 2014, the last Government Group that it talked to was three or four months ago and i have the same deer in the headlight look when i talk about this stuff. Not because theyre doing anything wrong. Theyre agencies in the u. S. Government but want to do things, but the way our system works is policy sets requirements, requirements set funding. This is how we move our organizations. Im not sure anyone knows what their role is in countering influence online or who would have the ball. I made pick recommendations. Theyre pretty easy, actually. Fbi should look at investigations of hacks now for hero how might this be used for influence later and thats inoculation strategy. The statestate depth should refute falsehoods immediately. We did in iraq against terrorists and good at it. In the Intel Community we have to decide our strategy around information and influence but no one knows at least i dont know is no charge. Its ban year since this happened now and i havent seen a lot of gears moving in any direction at this point. Lets come back to that. Renee, take us to the private sector and talk about the platforms theyve been doing a lot some of them dog more than others, i think, but putting in more people to review accounts or view posts, to take away monetary incentive for fake news. Talk about where the incentive of the platforms and the incentive to clean it up verse versus theres a betweens between the economic mottle and clean up disinformation. In the private sector, they a problem nobody knows who in charge. They all monetize, their Business Models based on attention. Theyre selling ads and want to keep you on their platform, because if they want to be the one to serve you the ads because thats how they earn revenue. Theres a fundamental case why one fundamental challenges here is doing michigans things to make you happy on the platform and its personalized. You see the things that are likely to make you happy and keep you on the platform, and so when that intersect witches an influence pray, its very carefully tailored. Influence operations have been around for decades. But the vectors of disseptember nation have changed. The ability to personalize the content has changed. The antibiotic to target individuals with exactly what is going to work for them based on a corpus of data that the platforms have accrued about each one of us over years and years of use and feedback loops. What did you click on . Ifed doesnt tell me something about you directly i have correlation to someone who is like you so i can target you through the lookalike audience or custom audience in which i do anybody running aned adder or growing an audience on a platform like facebook is reaching people who are predistoesed to be interested in the content. Its such an effective means of delivery. Thats the base framework. The problem is, if ten years ago the concept of the filter bubble was popular. Showing people what they wanted to see and that was creating information silos. When you look at what has to be done to break people out of that, say these people are more likely to be predisposed to disinformation content, themast are not coming back and tell peopling who view this content that they were targeted. So right now a lot of the conversations we have been having is what are the responsibilities of the platforms. Can we ask them to act against their own economic interests and the interests of society and that was a theme that was underlying the hearings. The way an information appraisal is conducted, its not unique to one network. Might start if you tenant to see the story by put by writing an article, create as content farm or blog or anyone can write anything on the internet. This was supposed to be a great advantage because we all had the opportunity to make our voices heard and get information out there. But i can write something something on hi blog and post it to red did. I can see what resonated with the audience im trying to reach. I think see the ranking of what is moving up the page. Its being voted on by the readers. Theyre endorse it and then take the content that plays intel move it over to facebook, and on facebook i can use an add campaign to grow an audience, and once i have some audience, then i achieve what is called organic left and that the idea that rather than having to pay to serve content, my hundreds of thousands of people who have been on to follow my page or who have joined my group are going to push that content out for me. So facebook has a much larger oddsens than reddit. Iveteed the content on reddit, and there are platform it can see the reaction of the community. Then i can move it to facebook or have people begin to do the sharing work for me, which brings down the costs to run one of these campaigns. At this point i have hundreds of thousands of people disseptember nateing my prop gambling da for fry, and i can take it to twitter. Twitter has a much smaller onens than facebook, twitter has high concentration of media users, a ton on journalists on twitter, millions of trump has 45 million followers. The at that point i can kind of cross the rubicon and i if i can make something trend on twitter or retreat my article, i can at that point pretty much guarantee there will be some Media Coverage of it. Media coverage might debunk it but it doesnt matter because even in the act of debunking it, its still continuing to keep it in the public consciousness. The media can cover it uncritically, which we have seen happen. We call them hoaxes but thats a quaint term. We should really use the term disinformation campaign. If the media doesnt controversy i can start a Conspiracy Theory why the media didnt cover that topic. I ick win either way. Somebody interested in conducting a campaign will do it in a crossplatform strategy and theres one noh one really responsible for shutting it down because the platforms, im told they have some kind of back channel information sharing but we didnt see anything really remarkably effective in 2016, and we have continued to see some interesting hoaxes take place with regard to the alabama election. Right now ongoing. So thomas, talk to us about the concept of organic. What is the rule of the bot in what renee was describing and what is the nature of the problem . Well, bot is certainly an important problem, but before we talk about some of the more technical aspects of am mixification operations on amplification on social media, we should step back and speak about the role of the press, journalists. Historically theres a great line from the head of star si disinformation, is was brilliant. They were better at this than kgb because the main target was west germany so spoke the language and could listen to them they could make german jokes and west germans would laugh about them. As much as germans joke. So they have this what would be the active measures operator without the journalist . The journalist is an integral part of disinformation, and we saw that at play in 2016 in the u. S. Election interfering in a new way. Tease out how it was new. Active measures i mentioned this particularly bad one from 1960. Back in the day were you needed to know what youre doing. They required craftmanship from intelligence operators. Today, or rather in 2016, the active measure was very much industrial scale. They had a lot of data, but the data into the Public Domain through wikileaks and other front, and then it whats journalists of the victim society, the victim country, in this case the out, that actually created the value in terms of the damage done because they went in and looked for the gems and nuggets and reported them and ignored the source. Every journalist0 everybody who thinks, well, now we certainly understand the risks. We wouldnt do the same make the same mistake again. We have to think again two weeks ago, a little thing happened in germany which is remarkable. Two weeks ago, spiegel ran aster about the germany u. N. Ambassador it and what reported he send an email to the u. N. Secretary general asking in am improper way to create a job for his wife. Probably shouldnt have done that. But der spiegel quote from the email that consent to the u. N. General secretarys chief of staff, and they dont say where they got the email from. The next day, an anonymous germ january source says, wait a minute, we know that ap20 is and specifically identify that is a Russian Military intelligence hacked u. N. Systems. Found the email, gave it to a journalist, and he ran the story for the second timement he had done that already a couple months prior, knowing he probably advances the interests of a russian intelligence agency. I think we shouldnt underestimate the competitive the rough competitive nature of journalism in a crisis that is actually created by these social Media Companies. So you have the perfect storm for active measures. Clint, would you pick up on that. Sometimes its the competitive forces, sometimes its ignore raines ignorance and they feel they have no choice, its trending, the bots are pushing it, the president has talk about it. What can be done and if the government if theres a limit to what our government can do, Civil Society is taking measures to push back. Right. He is exactly right. Competition is one of the motives that makes it super easy get to active measures to work. The other one is fear. I you can scare a population, which the russians and the soviets before them were very smart about doing, clam to us messages, hit them with fear and then load up a platal political message theyre more likely to fall for as well you. See that with the benghazi conspiracies and things push around in the social media space. Some people would grab them, vie few but only takes a couple and those with the most followers are mavens in their network and can spread it more quickly. There are things we need to think about. The internet and anonymity. Every counsels to the internet with the best of intentions and those with the most resources, time and the worst intentions, ultimately take control of it. This is you can look at criminals and hackers, what happened to anonymous, by the way, and arent they going around the world marking us transparent and free . Anybody wonder what happened to those guys . The big and the powerful ultimately come to learn how these things work, and if you arent under the rule of law, if you dont have to worry about civil liberties, if you dont have to worry about a free press checking you, youre going to use this system and its happening around the world today. I think myanmar is a great case study how this has been duplicated in a year. All Political Parties will do this over the next two or three years if they dont feel constrained. Were seeing this plan out in elections today. So, things we can do. One, authenticity of authorship. A real person that is behind the social media isnt . There are ways to protect their identity. Ways we can protect anonymity but there are Public Safety factors. We always say First Amendment doesnt protect the right for you to yell fire in a movie theater. We say Disinformation Networks pumping conspiracies around, hey, jfk has been evacuated. Maybe its a terrorist attack. Maybe someone was shot. Maybe the truth, where is the fruit in that . It never comes back. People believe the first thing they read and its very hard to refute those things. Theres a Public Safety component to this that goes well beyond just the political component of it. At the other thing is how you deal with the news issue and the social Media Companies initially jumped tout try to do fact checking. That was always going by a giant waste of time. I can make fake news faster than you can check it. If you want to stop an artillery barrage you silence the gun. So we talked about a rating system, nutrition labels for information which is be like sweeps for television. Seems like i think google and maybe facebook, with some of the Media Companies are now onboard. Theyre going through at least trying to couple with a system to figure out who it doing 80 20. Maybe if youre a mainstream outlet and doing 80 20 it will hurt you, the rating and. The idea toy reward Good Journalism and this will prevent the fake news outlet wes talk about, which kept popping up, from popping up so quickly and gaining we were tracking 1415, 16, the growth of outlets that would pop up in Eastern Europe and then wanted to talk about how the Federal Reserve was terrible and should be destroyed and gotten rid of, all day long. Or the middle of the night. How do you stop that . Have to put a metric or challenge on. Ultimately comes down to education and understanding Information Sources and have to put it back on the consume. Like the nutrition label. Make the consumer decide. Dont squash the outlet. I they want to write garbage and one wants to read garbage 90 of the time, fine. Its like your crazy uncle that seen e send you the weird email and you so i, uncle go to fact check and this is a false story. So lets push it back to them and empair them. We have had a become thats has come into social media that was never reading newspapers. You understand how this happened. People have jumped over and theyve gone from assessing news from their friends to assessing one thousand inputs a day on social media. This is a huge mental leap but were going to fail. Everybody falls for fake news once in a while. The more real the medium, the more youll fall for it. This will make this even more dynamic. So we have to inform the public and help them make better decisions on their own so theyre not pointing to social Media Companies, not pointing to politicians, not pointing to journalist, have to be responsible for their own information consumption. Thats what the europeans have done over 50 years, have been better about educating the public and were seeing a major shift, win you look at france and germany, reason they also consume far less news on social media than they do from traditional news sources and even from friends and family. If you look at the actual numbers. But that will change over the next 10 to 20 years. Youre seeing the Younger Generation moving to this. So i think its super important that we sort of work on the public for them taking responsibility for themselves and also help them understand the dangers. Like if you buy we had this with Consumer Reports and bad products. In the ons and 8s so. You buy the chinese import that is 75 cheaper than the good that is competing against it, it might burn your house down. That could happen. But thats on you. That was your choice to purchase that. So informing the public and helping the public make better decisions is something that guess all around for our country. On the nutrition labels or the fact checking, some of the ways in which the platforms have asked journalism or others on the outside to find their problems and help them correct that systemic, i keep hearing the expression about artisanal, and that feels artisanal and its coming faster. Renee, what ways think algorithms be used to fight back . People talk about this. How can the algorithms be used not no substitute for Public Education but to bat back the more dangerous things, given the First Amendment protections. Theres some interesting challenge us because al go richmond are run by people and inherent. One thing that comes to mind is facebooks recommendation engine. So, the recommendation engine is designed to serve you things you want to see so you stay on facebook it and can continue to drive engagement. If i like a page, heres a very specific example. If you are prone to conspiracy thinking the greatest predictor in belief is a conspiracy is belief another conspiracy. Welldocumented and psychological list er. I if you like a page on an antivaccine page, facebooks recommendation engine takes those as input and serves you content related to other conspiracy and one thing we saw in late 2015, early 2016, was we again to see facebooks recommendation engine recommending pizza gates, the conspiracy that Hillary Clinton ran a vast underground sex inert from a pizza place. Its taking people who believe in sued sew science and health relates con sirs and then pushing them down the rabbit hole into antigovernment conspiracy or other the moon landing was fake. 9 11 was a. He the kind of truther community. Theres a weird intersection and actually because the recommendation engine is serving that content to people. So its an interesting problem because from a facebook business standpoint, its giving the people what they want to see, but this where is we ask the question one conversation happening in the valley right now iswhats the kind of ethical design there . Theres a choice architecture. Dont give people who are hungry if you she them the doughnuts furs versus the salad theyll east the doughnut. I if you put the salad out there first theyre likely to make a choice that is potentially better for them. What are the unintended consequence over to algorithms and how were thinking about what we created and might we make more ethical decisions that dont necessarily negatively impact profit, but do things that are better for people. This the undercurrent in the valley. Its not censorship to not suggest some of this content. I. I someone wants to go to facebook and type in pizzagate and join those groups that is facebooks decision to decide what remains on a platform under the First Amendment protections or information sharing, information available. When you make the decision to serve something up, thats a proactive action by a platform and this is where things kind of get into a little bit of a area where we could potentially see the platforms make design decisions that could have potentially quite a powerful impact. Can i tack on to the comment there and. Sure. Comment on twitter design decision that some people follow the twitter abuse by bots, especially at wondered why is twitter not done this . Just an example. Make very concrete. Some of you here in the room may remember when twitter had egg profile pictures by default. Things, this jokes about eggs didnt provide interesting content. So you could opt out of egg for a while. When you sign up for a new twitter account you can click the becomes, i dont want people in my feed that have an egg picture. That was possible for a while. Now why is it not possible to opt out of bots . Out of bot traffic . Twitter claimed in the hearings several types that have sophisticated Machine Learning mechanisms in place that can automatically recognize bots. So why dont they give you this opportunity to click to take a bot and have no more bot traffic. The answer is probably because they would then cut down their entire active user base by doing that, by significant amount. The notion of optin versus optout is profound. We have seen it outside of the Digital World in organ donation. Do you voluntarily opt people in and make them decide not to participate versus making them check the box . So this is an interesting thing with bots and with twitter, the blue check macant, when i got my blue checkmark, verification marker, i was scroll through the new set examination they had something that said, turn off low quality accounts. I thought, oh, my goodness, this has been available the entire time. So they have a sense of what is a low quality account and theyve given blue checkmarks used to be only famous people and they give them the opportunity for not to see them for years, and thats a decision that rather than creating this pleasant experience for everyone, thats something that really took years to get to the idea that maybe people would want to opt out of bot content. Lets open it up to members for questions. I want tree mind everyone this is on the record, and ask you to wait for the microphones, speak directly into it. State your name and affiliation. I think we have question right here. Thank you very much. Jewel corti from the wilson center. I really i dont care who answer this, but this controversy of having rt and sputnik register as foreign agents the rationale behind that obviously is a law that was passed in 1938 to protect americans from propaganda by the nazis, and im just wondering whether that type of law really has any relevance today . Bus how can you protect people against something that every minute something is coming into their box from one account or another . Is that law obsolete and what is your opinion on forcing rtm and sputnik to register as foreign agents. Want to go first . I mean, its great that they did that. I wont affect anything. That it see own social media. Most people that have sent me rt this has happened quite a bit. In 2015 we were i was receiving russian propaganda from friends who were then arguing with me i didnt know what i was talking about. Im lake, okay. Im glad in missouri you dont know what rt is. Yao know what rt is . Yeah, its rt. Im lake, okay. People dont assess sources because you trust your friends and family that send you things more than you trust someone else. So part of rts methodology, which was brilliant, we cant beam in Satellite Television but we can put things on you tush and then producers and reporters share if we likeminded people. So as it moves along you dont know writ came from and this is part of the problem regardless of rt or sputnik news. They will just say oh, its all propaganda. Its your propaganda. Nbc, cnn, fox, doesnt thats all prop beganda, its all propaganda, and this very much the russian world of information in russia. Its your p. R. , their been r. Hey if lost that bearing about reporting versus opinion, and fact versus fiction. That has sort of gone sideways and i dont think that declaring a source any is too late as propaganda help this public. I dont think theyll know even theyll read a story that says at that time rt or sputnik had to register, and when they sift, as long its appeal thor preferences theres going to couldnt assume it. Its good they do that so theres awareness this is a state sponsored news outlet and many other state sponsored news outlets from around the world. We see this with all authoritarian regimes but how the public consumedas long its makes then happy theyll keep filling their billy and noggin with whatever you feet them. So any outlet, whether u. S. Or oversea, nose thats the formula for content dissemination. One back there. Im craig charney. I think people from from the Foreign Policy or tech communes, we do survey research for campaigns and marketing as well as Foreign Policy issuesle we worked in Public Diplomacy a decade ago and now these issues two questions. One just came out of clints comments. The reason why rt looks so good and so professional is because its not designed in russia. Theyre content is designed in new york, by one of our best pr agencies. So one question is im sorry. I have to limit you to one question. Okay. Well,ll stick with this one since i started it. It would make sense to oblige American Companies and organizations who are professionally assisting for an influence operations to declare themselves foreign agents . Yes. I mean, thats a simple answer for me. We have to the reason russian active measures work and soviets didnt is three parts. One is analog versus digital. You can do it fitter in it did work analog they had success but took much longer. The other part what the russians figured out for americans is that too much information is worse than no information. So, theyve taken the envelope and sort of opened it up and then saturate. Gone from, well try to control all information, to ill bomb you with so much information you dont not what i true or false, which is brilliant. The other part why it works theres enough economic openness that you can actually run a ground lever along with the virtual. So this is what americans completely miss in all of our we love our social media. So we keep talking about social media. It rocks because they take physical things, facts, and then they use that in either manipulated truths or other falsehoods to push the conspiracy. There are physical actors, just like you mentioned, they have physical partners also helping them. And if were going to be upset about the influence, we have to look at how to characterize agencies like that, if its starting to break up or democracy. Were seeing divergence at such a level, were much closer to real breaks in the United States than people understand at this point. If you have someone doing that kind of stuff and then the question will be, what if u. S. Companies are doing it on behalf of the United States overseas or the u. S. So its a twoway street. The policy question is going to bet super, super complicated, it think. Thomas . I would just add a cautionary note. One thing that makes this country so great sort of still extremely attractive for the rest of the world, just is the First Amendment and the strength of the First Amendment. So, as soon as we start messing with the notion that we can declare certain forms of speech because they come from foreigners in the a way that could he hostile and thats not okay anymore. Crossing a line somewhat. I just would like to sort of call take to that. One of the lines that has been drawn is on foreign interference in elections. Thats different than foreign speech. But youre right to draw that thats exactly what want to zero in on. Talking about an attack on the United States, information attack. You have to look at repercussions about that attack. What ultimately will come out is this counterinfluencer thing is the u. S. Isnt going to be able to do much of anything. So you have to pull a different strategic lever. The u. S. Should never repeat what was done to it to another country. I would be very upset if we hacked into thousands of people residents emails and dumped their personal information of any country out of the internet. I dont want to see false journalist stories. Ive seen that nonsense talked about in the past week in the new york planting of news stories, differ crediting outlets. Ill be very upset in our country if we do that. There are several thursday to decency russia if we wants to course attack but its not to do their playbook back against them. It undermines our values, hurts us as a country, violates free speech, and so with that, i think my answer was, we just suffered a major information attack that affected our elections and people in the United States dont believe their vote counted. We have to come up with some sort of response. We have to move on. We have a question right here, the lady in blue. With something i group. It appears to me that were going to have to be more delegate our candidate indication system deliberate in our Education System so the youth are more critical thinkers. What can we do to improve the Public School system . Because i dont believe that its going to be helping this situation. Well, i can speak to this a little bit. Are we going to do Public Education anymore . Im not sure. Would going some weird directions on Public Education. I went to a become school, both in high school and college, military academy, but one of the classes we teach in the intelligence community, eye ron clerks is called evaluating Information Sources. Its a set curriculum and really good and its super helpful for me. There are ways you can water that and boil that down for a High School Curriculum that i took be super valuable, and the European Countries have done this. I believe its sweden has done this sort of thing which is helping their people injured or think about ways to evaluate Information Sources without going into political biases and getting crazy with it. It would be hard to implement in the United States because of our state delivery of education services. Italy just put out a curriculum for this. Dont know the specifics but it was announced a couple weeks ago. I dont know if you remember, whole Public Education around subliminal tiding which studies said was not really such a big threat but we all were educated about it and scared by advertising for a long time. Allen, austin. The discussion of education and the comment on what makes america to attractive the rest of the world, firsthand, free speech, raises the issue. Maybe instead of focusing on educating the public about evaluating information, we should reemphasize teaching the values that make America Great and are the fundamental principles. We have didnt disstreaked by conspiracy theories exam it necessary news stories. Woe dont hear promotion of First Amendment and due process and wave moved away from that in teaching Civic Education women maybe we need reemphasize that to bring the country back to a reasonable appreciation of information. I think europeans are doing thing. Think its absolutely unreal that in 1980 i watched the olympics. Against the soviet union and then charlottesville theyre chanting russians are our friends. And thats a weird transition. One of the most fundamental almost a philosophical discussion to have is deletion. Twitter epitomizes this problem. We all have the same intuition that russian bots and president s should not be able to delete tweets because its on the Public Record. We also all have the same intuition that 16yearolds who tweet something stupid should be able to delete tweets. How do you reconcile the two . Thats a facinating question and we should pay more attention to it. One thing we were arguing for is a researcher who looks a twitter data and then the terms of service of the ipi if the tweet is deleted youre supposed notime which is why during the head of the hearings twitter comp piled and released a list of account but by the time it was made available to the public and the senate had godden life to content weapon face the forecasts platforms have avision evidence interest in knot sharing the information so were trying to sort out things liking this. Why the russian bots have privacy rights . Because the justification for the right to be forgotten and the 16yearolds an to delete her tweet is personal privacy. I this irfake accountants. Its ludicrous to think were give privacy considerations to fake people. But that is the state of the conversation as it stands today. David of the gw project for media and national security. Panelists, clint in particular but all panelists, i fells my question right now on the topic of this panel is, can we trust facebook and google and others to get the problem that clearly emerged in the last election under some kind of control or at what stage does there need to be regulation of our social Media Companies in order to prevent their platforms from being used to change the results of elections. I want to add something we have not talk about. We dont want to battle the last war so in terms of both where the threat is coming from may not just be russia and secondly, the different kinds of tooled that will be used. What renee, what social media platform does and what should the government do. I think it will be regulation you have different avenues. Market propoeted regulation which is would useres get very angry and inspire the companies to change their behavior to keep users happy. Thats something the media often helps push through. Or selfregulation where the companies decide, kind a consortium of the industry and worth their time, and third is government, which takes much longer, and i dont think well see that happen by 2018, which i of course a source of major concern for people who Pay Attention to this problem. I think that we saw with isis a this is not russia is not the first time that the tech platform has had disinformation and propaganda problem. It took several years to get the Tech Companies to kind of come together on the idea of creating this Global Internet forum to counterterrorism. I imagine you know more about this than i do. I think it was three years from the identification of the problem and the request that something be done to this organization being stood up to do something. So, in many ways i think well bee dependent on media researches and people putting out much like what were seeing with the disinformation around the Roy Moore Campaign in alabama, paying you to look at this you. Need to get the story out there need to have twitter responding to researchers rather than attempting to diminish and discredit work of independents. Bots and abuse is a threat to facebooks Business Model because facebook is ultimately about authentic im account, and as a result facebook is trying to tackle the problem and theyre throwing money and people and resources at the problem, and i think has made some right moves. A lot of bad press for it but making the right move. Twitter, the opposite applies to twitter. For twitter, bots nor at threat. They happen twitter because they make it appear larger. From twitter we can expect the opposite and i wouldnt by spreads today see if the engineers have left twitter and moved to facebook to fix the problem. So i think twitter deserves a lot more attention and a lot more criticism than it is getting. I would just highlight a thing that is technical but put it in very plain english. Ill use an analogiment imagine the economist or whatever the New York Times decides, well, we should give our readers the ability to unpublish letters to the editor from our web site. They could do that. Right . Fair enough. That is what twitterer is doing. But twitter is also saying we should give our readers the ability to unpublish letters to the editor not just from the webs of the New York Times but from the library of congress. And that is just not okay. If we have something on the Public Record from people who have chosen to keep put something on the Public Record for an effect, not necessarily the 15yearold, then they shouldnt be able to remove the record from the nonpublic, sometimes nonpublic repository because the effect is they make history and in fact the news editable as a result. Youre seeing that from foreign actors. How many dish mean, just be make this edgier opt how many retweets that the real donald trump account receives when he tweets. Russia . How many of the retweets are actually bots versus human beings . The retweets or likes . Answer we dont know and maybe twitter doesnt even know, and couldnt even find out as a result of those policy. Because of the deletion. You can watch the last few minute offered the discussion on Cyber Security online our