Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion On Disinformation Campaigns 20240714

It is august. It Means Congress and the president are on vacation. Todays topic is not on vacation. And it wont be, at least to the 2020 election. The Wilson Center isnt putting off the conversation. That being said, this information is hardly a new problem that in the midst of this cold war the United States and soviet union both try to influence political and social narratives in other parts of the globe. For example, a new article published by the Wilson Centers history of Public Policy program has unearthed and related russian documents related to operation denver interesting name. Its a campaign in the 1980s to spread the life that hiv was created as a result of the pentagons biological weapons research. So, disinformation wasnt invented in 2016 and family, unlikely to be buried in 2020 but today we delve into the context and have the right moderator and speakers to do that. Our first battle, which starts right now, is on historical patterns. Moderating is the very talented, kate baldwin. The anchor of cnn morning show at this hour and formally the coanchor of a new day and the situation room with wolf blitzer. Kate and her colleagues have done critical work on the topic. Earlier this year cnn created an interactive website that shows the danger of deep fakes, doctored but realistic videos that can show public figures saying and doing things they never did. 2016 the pentagon has spent at least 68 million on technology to detect deep fakes. But the issue is unlikely to go away before 2020. We are also joined vote by our very own, very, very own cannot dig which, a global fellow with a institute who is writing the book on russian how much do i get for this . Book on russian disinformation. [laughter] it comes out next summer called how to lose the information war based on our on the ground experience in ukraine and we welcome jessica buyer, a lecturer and Research Scientist at the university of washingtons Jackson School of International Studies Whose Research has focused on International Cyber security and nonstate actors as well as online political activism and finally, the director of strategic projects, Cyber Security and democracy and put that on a calling card of microsoft, drying on years of experience in Political Campaign. She worked on Microsoft Partnership with the Iowa Caucuses in 2016 to create a Smart Phone App for caucus organizers to report the results of the vote more quickly and accurately than before. So, in conclusion in todays complex world its more important than ever to provide real facts and trustworthy information. Everyone and everyplace is being tested, including the Wilson Center. We are doing our best and we really need our friends on this Panel Including the media to do its parts. I look forward to todays panel, two panels, kate, over to you. Thank you, jane. Not surprisingly, jane lays out the challenge, the issue of the topic in today really well. I think before you look forward you must look back. That is where i think we should start with history, the patterns and trends of what were seeing what comes to disinformation. Maybe starting with operation denver as jane talked about but nina, i wonder disinformation is not new and how far back do you look to where you would say the first real Disinformation Campaign youve been researching, where do you put it up . A lot of people want to go back to the soviet time and compare what we saw ben with whats now but theres an important difference. While the tactics are the same the tools have changed. Social media allows the information getting put out there and its not all fake. Its usually grounded in a kernel of truth or real feelings, real discontent that his weapon eyes to fight bad actors, including russia and other foreign actors. The social media allows those bad actors to spread those messages much more quickly allow them to travel at lightning speed and also allow those messages to be targeted to the very people who will find the most appealing and that is what makes what were seeing today so much more difficult to counter. Looking at the modern era in disinformation 2. 0, my book started 2007 in estonia with the crisis when a lot of false stories about how ethnic russians in democratic estonia were being treated in this new era were spread among the population they are. It led to riots and led to some real social discourse that the estonian government that had to counter. They did that not by trying to do about voices of the press or counter narratives that were grounded in truth about how the russian population was feeling but did that by reading the ethnic russians back into the fold by focusing on integration and education that something will come back to later today i can promise that. Jessica, we all know at this point, especially everyone in this room, we all know what disinformation means generally and probably but define the term for us. This is what im most interested in. You say its not always what it seems but its whats the difference between disinformation and propaganda human. Rights. Nothing in academic love being asked to define something. Most people talk about disinformation as information that is false and with an intent to deceive attached to it. Academics talk about misinformation is Bad Information that spread unwittingly so the difference of disinformation propaganda there are people who also divide that out out. Propaganda is an organized effort to spread disinformation or information that isnt necessarily entirely untrue or maybe the way its talked about. Its another tactic so he focused on disorder rather than a narrative of people protesting for their rights. Different ways you can look at different events and stress certain things over others. One of the things that academics are starting to point out is that we have this conversation about disinformation or misinformation we think disinformation is something thats a bad actor or doing and misinformation is you know, my aunt whos sharing on facebook a story thats on true but does not know there are people like alice who look at the social context that people are a part of. People share information, not just because they think its true but also because it resonates with them or signals the place in a group, you know, shows they are part of some Overall Group rather than other ones. If you are looking at this information in places that are vulnerable to violence you know people are also sharing misinformation and they dont know the thing they are sharing about between kidnapped children and that information is often grounded in existing societal hatred so there is the idea that purveyors of disinformation are the malicious ones and its not exactly true. Right even misinformation can be dangerous as well. What are the tactics, jenny jenny how have the tactics changed . Im interested from your perspective. Were talking about how the information spreads but how are the tactics changed and how you take on talking about how things used to be and how they are now and have never changed and espionage is a thing that existed and that is not new but what is new is weaponization of the information you get. Its not new that even Political Campaigns are hacked. That happened in previous cycles in the u. S. And in recent history but what is new is the tactics the enemy uses when they get a hold of that information. One thing we think about it into the patient and important to have Historical Context in order to anticipate and handle it but also important not to solve yesterdays problems entirely and to think about what might come next. Thats what the conversation around the fake even though i dont know how much everyone knows about the concept but it sounds like some might be more expert in it but the idea that videos looking like something is saying that that individual did not say it might be not seen a rise in it yet its anticipating that that is what is coming next. That is how we are focused on these issues right now is thinking about what is next, how will the playbook from the 4p changed and made new in the next cycle. You all talk about something that is the goal of disinformation. Is it always the same, nina . Is always to change hearts and minds or force a segment to do what you want them to do or sometimes is it more insidious than that . Is the goal from estonia to today of disinformation the same . I think what is interesting about what were seen from the kremlin is that its not to change hearts and minds but thats how i would draw the line between propaganda and disinformation. Propaganda is agitating on behalf of a certain cause whether the government or some sort of Political Movement et cetera. Disinformation particularly russian disinformation is a need to create as much chaos and disorder as possible. That is a theme that goes from estonia right through to georgia, poland, czech republic, ukraine certainly, especially in ukraine. In fact, its trying to inspire a sense of distrust in the democratic system so that people dont go out and invest in that buddy new democracy but certainly since 2016 i think were seen more distressed building in our democratic system as well whether thats in the media or in our election in the structure or whether thats in campaigns and political structures themselves. In that regard the Disinformation Campaign that we thought in 2016 that continues today, although we cant tell if it changed a single vote, has been successful in that regard. To that point, is there a pattern you think if there was a pattern people would be wiser to it already. Is there a pattern to Disinformation Campaigns . Is the russian disinformation distinct from the Disinformation Campaign put out by iran or what happened in ukraine and is that different from what happened essentially in the United States and is there a Common Element that you find . In these things. Yet, the Common Element and this is what makes it so difficult to counter is the fissures in our societies whether economic or racial or political especially Political Polarization those are the things that all of these campaigns weapon eyes to their advantage and that means that its not as simple as just plain wacky patrol. While i dont know about th that. We could ask for faith book notes. Is not just a simple as deleting accounts but it takes Good Governance and invest in from our politicians and Civil Servants and folks like you. Thats interesting. Who are the worst offenders, jessica . I want to add that were agree about expectation about the deep issues that will be variable across countries and there has been research that has found some patterns. There are more internal Disinformation Campaign than extra ones where we have a nationstate for example, acting against something you might see internal people seeking political power or acting for some personal gain within their own country. Yeah, and also people doing it to make money. You add money spreading out stories about that 2016 that happening as well and other research out of Oxford Institute they have found you see this Information Campaign outside both and it gets tricky when you define a Disinformation Campaign as the government controls the media but there have been some efforts to look for patterns like that across countries. It would have to be the worst offender of it of a Foreign Government trying to influence outside of its borders, i guess, would have to be. Who would be the worst offender . Him down russia . Yeah, absolutely. Also, any actor that is attempting to use create a situation where violence is likely to further their Political Goals they would be the worst offenders generally across everywhere in the world. What is it about russia . A lot of times i get a question about why is what russia did in 2016 any different then this type of things the United States does all around the world . Im talking about over operations and not talking about what our intelligence agencies do and the answer that i give is very much grounded in my background having worked as a National Democratic institute in supporting prodemocracy after around the world. Whenever we did rightparenthesis they were out in the open. Anyone can come. Anybody from any Political Party could come and sign up to learn how to run a Petition Campaign or learn how to run a Political Campaign. What russia did in 2016 was much more Surreptitious Campaign but did not get anyones consents. We did not know we were being messaged to buy the russian government and that is what i find so objectionable about that, also illegal, clearly. This is not something anybody bought into. And, we are seeing other nationstates mimicking the russian state, you both mentioned iran and we saw saudi accounts in china is doing this within its own borders and reset does it to his own people all the time but its that lack of openness that goes against our very democratic being that i find to make russia most objectionable in this case. Here are when there is good news. We now know the playbook and method and now its all about education and not to move into the territory of the next panel but solution focused and being able to educate the public about what the operations look like. Dhs put out a great info graphic a couple weeks ago about the war on pineapple and essentially took an issue that is divisive but not political which is whether or not pineapple along on pizza. Im anti pineapple on pizza, personally. This will get real because im very pro pineapple. [laughter] they took this topic it went to five easy steps to using this understandable info graphic to show what the adversaries are doing with the topic to pauls point that is divisive. We have something we disagree on so how do they take the think we disagree on and drive a wedge from one of the methods they use. Im encouraged because i see our government doing things and Civil Society organizations and doing things to educate the public around that and the awareness that is through the roof and we fixed it and we can move on but it is encouraging to see progress has been made. It sounds like there havent been effective defensive against disinformation maybe not very many examples historically but have you seen effective defenses against disinformation . Are there any other than where we are in this moment . Not to be a broken record but the biggest defense is educating the people of how to discern what theyre reading, understanding the techniques and been able to filter it better. Its also about weve been talking about disinformation versus misinformation and how do you define different terms and if we can get on a similar page about what is happening that might be the thing but people are working hard at it. Absolutely. I would agree that education is important and i call it a citizen space solution, not just looking at children when we talk about education but voting age people and helping them navigate the flow of Information Online but something that does give me pause from what ive seen recently in ukraine during their president ial election is that bad actors are now adapting their tactics to the kind of obstacles that some of the social media problems have put up but also post russia 2016. Im talking this year 2019 so rather than being stopped by the wall put up they are burrowing under or going around in different sorts of ways. Im interested in that. What are is there a way to describe to us how are they burrowing and learning and what do they take from the russian playbook that they have now grown or built upon . There was a lot of discussion about political advertisements in the 2016 election and facebook has now put a lot of transparency measures in place so you can search those outside actors and foreign actors if they helpful tool for research and journalists. Anticipating this russia according to the Ukrainian Security Service Based on activity i saw when i was getting bad and looking through all that information in ukrainian and russian when i was in ukraine during the 2019 president ial election russia is trying to rent peoples facebook account in order to use them as adding mules and offering them about 100 a month or so which in ukrainian terms is a third of an average ukrainian salary in order to use their accounts to get around those ad restrictions. Security Service Found this out, alerted facebook and i dont think that will necessarily stop russia and its against their terms of service certainly but this is something that worries me. Those who dont have Strong Political press excesses and want to get extra cash or someone in a third world country will be happy to rent out that facebook account. Its like a hacker for hire yeah, thats a scary thing and a lot of manipulation going on in groups. Its moving up in the facebook hierarchy in terms of what people are seen so folks are being told or made a belated to share more content that they are seen in secret and close facebook groups and its harder for researchers like me to track and notify the correct people about and theres more trust in those groups. Right . People are in a group about a politician they like someone says here, share this meme. They dont know where its coming from but if their trusted group. Things like that scary to me and its the non monetized content where news is traveling organically and again, based on peoples real feelings and worries that is being amplified in a very authentic way. Just wait until the end of our discussion. Just kidding. Jessica, how would you say social media, what social media has met in terms of this information . I think weve all pointed out one of the things that is really changed, the birth of the internet and rise of social media platforms means that we take those trusted roots and we put them into that structure and then we daisychained in together and it makes this great structure for information to move. Sometimes good information but also Bad Information. Im sure everybody here has had the experience of someone who you trust, like this is a smart person, they know a lot about this thing, they share a story on facebook or another place, and to read the headlight and share it because you trust that person. There is research that shows that that that the process, thats like the perfect Fertile Ground for disinformation to spend. Its also something very hard to tackle, like as a thomas did we dont want people to not trust each other. Society needs trust to functional, particularly democracies. How do we give people the Critical Thinking skills ask that question, particularly, i i been doing research in the facebook groups, parenting groups were misinformation can spread quite easily. People are very worried and may be sleep deprived asking questions about their childrens health. That can take you down the bad path very quickly. Also with education, we see that being very successful in certain places. There was specific profile in finland in their efforts, but a lot of the world the Education Systems already very stretched and theyre trying hard to do a lot of different things. And so to ask that you at this other thing its also a big challenge that may be here we will come that something we can do although our own Education System has some issues. Its going to be counted as a this outcome this is a global problem, will be hard to ask of the countries to do that as well if they want to solve this issue. How much faster does, we know information moves, just look at the new cycle. We can see a fast information moves and how fast our lives move now. What if you had to compare, how much faster does this information take off today because of social media platforms versus free internet, presocial media when this information was still alive and well . Whats the saying, and we will make around the world before the truth can get its pants on. Thats amplified by how we are connected. If such a become just the fact you can send it in a faster, text somebody. The biggest social platforms, your text messaging. Ive heard that some of the way people communicate. Information travels faster between us and their benefits but it needs the bad stuff gets through. You have been, i follow a lot of the writings and youve been very critical of social media platforms and how they handle or the sampled information on the platforms. Do you think facebook, twitter, others, do you think 2016 that they should have known better . Its a typical question. I mean, in hindsight of course, right . But i do think in that political moment i understand and sympathize with what happened because even our own government couldnt make a call to say that a Foreign Government was acting on one path of account or another. I wish platforms wouldve been quick to respond what became clear what happened postelection. The solution that had been put in place have been a bit slow and things get through the cracks. That being said, were having a much more open a productive conversation about these things now. I think the fact that the platforms are open to a regulation conversation is good. I think its really important that Congress Take the reins there because i been some wording the pellets out of the white house. There was news last week about an executive order about political bias. I think we need to make sure we have a very, very well informed conversation about how this regulation of going to work and make sure its working on behalf of freedom of the press, freedom of speech. I know theres going to be a conversation about this on the next panel, but making sure we keep all of those albums that keep our democracy safe at heart. Heart. Its not just about the political bias question but is not creating a more robust and informed discussion. Do you remember, if there was a moment, that you began to think that there could be disinformation applet even if you have been pinpointing it on rush in the 2016 election . This is very personal and hindsight is 2020 but i remember, you it must be said, men, a lot of men, i was in ukraine at the time to working as a Strategic Communications advisor to the ukraine government as part of a fulbright grant. Russia and ukraine were very much on my mind. I was posting a lot of platforms about my experiences and a lot of men particularly that it would ayes with suddenly were chiming in on all of my profiles and sharing links to rt and sputnik about how we should reconsider the russian governments actions. And i said where is this coming from . Do you know that this is the russian government platform . Msp said rt and sputnik are by far some of the least effective means of russian disinformation. But thats when my spidey senses started to tingle a little bit and it reflected a lot of the stuff weve been seeing in ukraine where these links to russian essentially propaganda outlets were being surfaced by actors who again like local actors who had a sense of discontent for one reason or another. We had a similar thing happen that wed send some work with you i will caucuses where we were creating an app for the caucuses to result, to provide the results to headquarters. It wasnt about to being cast were counted. On the democrat side they do the undefeated anyway, is how they take those results back to headquarters in order to make sure the accurate results received and released to the press in a timely manner. And in the weeks leading up to the caucuses there started be some twitter activity saying microsoft was trying to win the election for marco rubio. It was really weird, like all these, of course i was one of the order was paying attention. I was searching for different terms and trying to understand how these random twitter accounts essentially at the same talking points, there are slightly different but were not entirely different and it were all on the same talking point which was microsoft was tied with the Iowa Caucuses for marco rubio. Someone created a meme like microsoft. It didnt really take off. It did hit dredge at one point. It never made into the mainstream, didnt become a big issue issue but i remember talking with all of my colleagues at the time Say Something really weird is happening here. I dont know why these random people on twitter seem to have this idea that the article then linking back to and where is this coming from. Thats when my senses started going off that something what was happening without any context of who is originating it. I can only imagine how many different people at some kind of this is really weird something is going on kind of conversation. Its not just Public Sector problem. Its a private sector, as well. When did you begin to think this isnt just a Public Sector problem, a private sector problem we need to be tackling . Its a good question. Frankly it answers the question to say the role i was in before the election versus the role im in now, because leading up to 2060 i worked on Campaign Tech for the company. I work with Political Campaigns on how they use Technology Come sort of an evangelist for tech and that includes security teachers but that was not our focus. Focus. Mike ironnet cybersecurity and democracy focus on campus. Election, disinformation defense. So the whole fact that team got spun up followed not just the 2016 election in the u. S. But what is going on in europe and ukraine and other places where this was clearly becoming an issue. Just this is a company we knew we needed to protect Democratic Institutions that it was important to us as a company both from a business standpoint, a Business Case to be made but also it was the right thing to do. For us i like to say we were included and are doing something more earlier but it was deathly something we focused much more on following the election. Jessica, do you see in 2016 that russia broke new ground . From your research, did they break new ground or was it just kind of, i hate to say it, like perfect storm of how it all went down . In this question of when people first saw Disinformation Campaigns, so i was in 2014 was working on a project in myanmar with one of my colleagues. One of the things were doing there was teaching people in Political Parties and trumpisms, librarians and actors have the use social media effective strategies. The people were talking about a disinformation problem, that there were these rumors about muslims that were spreading. I was there right after that was a big riot in mandalay over these rumors. At the time all the americans were like wow, a tough problem, terrible for myanmar, right . We talk about the cold war. Its not a new thing. Its just that weve seen the consolidation of people into major social media platforms. This creates a good channel for disinformation to spread. We see nationstate actor that is very savvy and is thought very hard about how to exploit that landscape and exploit societal divisions, for instance, in the United States. We have low trust immediate, low trust in government. A lot of division. This is like the program for disinformation. Its a longstanding problem but i think in 2016 we start to see, but also tracking before that, the practicing of these tactics and refining them and then sort of broadcasting them more broadly across europe and the United States but also of the parts of the world. You talked about the Intelligence Community determine that russia interferes in the election, but did not weigh in, did not render any judgment on whether the outcome wouldve changed. How then do you measure, you can take 2016 2016 election examplr another one, how do you measure whether Disinformation Campaign is a successful one . I think its measured by whether the conversation is change. If you look at the different interventions in 2016 that russia managed to pull off, we had the leaked that target the dnc. We had all of these meme and different sorts of social media content that would be shared and again im going to make the point that the ads were actually the least successful part of that. If you look at the organic engagement on a lot of those posts, it was much, much higher than what they achieved through purchasing 100,000 of ads. Because of all of that stuff, the campaign change how they were talking about themselves. People changed how they were talking about the election, and the media certainly change what they were covering. We were covering emails that would not have otherwise been made public. And the conversation changed. As a result we have to assume the way people thought about the election is not some folks were changed. I am not of the opinion that it is productive to try to make the calculation of whether the election was swarmed by a foreign actor or not. I think its disturbing enough that the conversation about our democratic process clearly was altered that much. Even if you just take the dnc hacking late but theres all this other stuff on top of it as well. What do you think about that . How do you, edwin is looking for a report card february is looking for report card but is at the way to judge if its successful or not . So i think nobody is really super been successful in saying can we count . How do we know conclusively . We can to russia cost this many votes to go way or that way. I agree, not a very fruitful way to think about disinformation. I think what we can say is we can see how information is moving. We can understand ways in which certain types of platforms are being used to spread that disinformation. We can see people reacting to the spread of, for instance, memes on twitter. Twitter is a great platform for disinformation because its a small platform but it has politicians and journalism academics, people who all andf i information are all there so its a great place for saying like microsoft is working for marco rubio and to try to get someones attention versus like facebook what about the stuff, even is still hidden. We dont know exactly what is being spread. My sense is that can we qualitatively or quantitatively say what exactly happened . Probably not but we can say were in a different landscape in which you have organized actors working to spread this information. Nationstates have resources. We see places like the politically incorrect that also put at disinformation maybe just for fun for me before political ends. We have an infrastructure that money facilitates that we are in, its a different landscape. And also once eglin sees russia do it, other countries, they can use them as well. To the question of the goal and if the goal is sowing chaos, which i think we can all agree police was one of the goals, the fact its august 2020 and were on a panel spend this much time tyvola happen i think it was successful. If that was the metric by which you are measuring, and whether they had other goals in mind and whether the election change or not is a a different topic buti think at least that big goal of sowing chaos and confusion and changing the conversation i think we can all pretty much agree that they succeeded on that one. Jessica, was more dangerous, Disinformation Campaign from a government like a nationstate, or one from like a nonstate actor . Is it always clear whos kind of running the operation . No, its not always clear. Governments, russia as an example, use nonstate actors. What those relationships are are not entirely clear. They could be hiring a marketing firm. They could be putting pressure on someone to do something. So that is one of the attribution issues we have in cybersecurity in general. How do we know when is a nationstate doing something versus the criminal within the border, then what type of responsibility is it is just the criminal, does that government have . We cant find them, right . In what does International Community do in the face of that . That issue just a general Cybersecurity Issue plagues this information disinformation. Nationstates have resources that both of actors dont have. If a nationstate focuses its will if were going to personify it onto doing Something Like that they can throw a lot of resources into that and that resources isnt just money. It can also be time. People, talent. And so i would say that in a broad scheme, that they are the most dangerous point within said countries and we are dealing with say political actors all using disinformation, thats also quite dangerous as well. The sowing chaos undermining trust and institutions, this is one thing that is a probable outcome of i will ask you to for if you look inside of the countries you see a particular political faction spreading disinformation. That can cause people to die, right . Which we havent exactly seen in the United States. But nationstates i always think, they just have a lot of resources. What do you guys think . I think jessica brings up a really good point about local and political actors and thats one of the reasons addressing that disinformation problem in the United States has been so difficult. Because we have seen many domestic actors using the same tactics that rush is using, and i think this is where the social media platforms get into bit of a quagmire. Because we can the United States care very much about our freedom of speech, and while in europe they are very happy to write a rule or some sort of law that takes away the rights of people, a people are mostly happy to give them up to some degree here in the United States this is a hard one that we are not going to give up. The answer i was have for this is in the United States, the platforms are not public institutions. They are not public squares. They have terms of service your site up to. I dont think most people when they sign up to share pictures of the kids and the dogs are thinking about that. We need a better model of informed consent for people to understand what their sign up for. So that they know theyre not about to spread hate speech and thats defined pretty clearly. How we get that out there is something thats up for debate and measure it will be discussed later, but whether they the government body who works with the platforms to decide those things, whether the platforms get together like they have when they dealt with terrorist content to set the standards and rules, but it think thats a real area for improvement because the same rules that make russia and iranian our saudi disinformation something we dont want on the platforms also applied to americans. That something when you do get more comfortable with and set guardrails around. Why cant you just design an app for that . [laughing] i dont know. Can i jump in . I think the platforms have been investing a lot in algorithmic detections. So using computers to detect violations of terms of service and i think weve seen a lot of disturbing content slips it cracks including recently the Christ Church shooter getting that content offline was a lot more difficult than it think people anticipated. And informed text by somebody wd been repeatedly posting that content. It wasnt remote and in the case this is a case of we need investment in people. We need human sowing of the content and yes, that is more expensive for the platforms but these are billiondollar companies. We need people with cultural linguistic context or you were talking about myanmar. Thats one instance where we needed people who understood that local context. Again i think this comes back to a citizen, a humanbasedbased solution to these problems acus these are people problems. The tech apple pie scent but they are people problems at their core. Whats the biggest challenge to protect against hacking still when you see obviously there was one element of these attacks from russia. What are the challenges that you guys are up against all the time . People still think they are a target. They just dont. In part because they dont understand the methods by which the attackers will tie and get to them. Like a difference between phishing email email or sometg like that . Or password phrase. Also needs is your domain and can fire up speed is talking like a dont know what youre talking about. Essentially someone just knows cnn. Com is your email address is essential that. They voiced by which they can send a bunch of phishing emails to anyone essentially at that domain who witnesses are need to have a sophisticated phishing against you personally. Those exists and psychosocial manipulation is pretty scary. But i guess there are a lot of people for like a junior staff person on a Congressional Campaign and they are like no one is after me. Its security by security. Im not anyone so he knows. Im not anyone some of his target. My job his and see and as long as you would do my job and i will not regret the septic assessment about the job of the justice of will and not me. Thats the biggest jump we found is we spent time talking to Political Company Political Campaign candidates around the world about basic cyber hygiene. Basic, like what is to drop off at the vacation. Largely they dont even have. A lot of them dont. They think its too hard. Its really not. You just need to sit down with them. Sometimes we spend our days sitting down with Political Campaigns with the phones and like walking them through to factor whether post 2016 . Yes. That happens a lot. They dont do some of the basics and a lot of times know what is teaching them or something pushed out to them. They think they will not be a target . They still think its like not going to happen to me . This is not blanket of you are, but we went into a lot of resistance with folks who just dont think they are a target. Speaking of the myanmar example, it had a big laugh because we try to do meetings in countries where they could us like myanmar. Like that stinks for you, america. But thats not going to happen here in this day country that is absolutely and will happen in. We are trying to get them to not just think of themselves as the target but their democracy as a target. Thats the biggest challenge on the small level as well as the broad, just awareness that they should be protecting themselves and doing the fundamentals. If they do the fundamentals turn on two factor, dont use same password for every count them use password manager tool. If they do those things they would be protected from like 92 of the tax. If you were a betting woman what are the chances, i mean, guaranteed foregone conclusion in your mind that there was going to be a campaign, Congressional Campaign, if it is in a president ial campaign, thats going to face some kind of, thats going to be hacked goes of what you just explain . It goes back to what is a playbook this time around. Weve been tracking nationstate attacks against our customers were in this article space. We have an account program what if theyre in the space taken up into the program and allows us to give them some beneficial information but it allows them to track but whats happening. So far weve not seen a lot of attacks against Political Campaign customers. Weve seen a lot in the think tank space come in academia. Those of the areas we are seeing it right now. Do you guys have run assumption on why that is . Similar to what we saw in previous cycles. Trying to get information from policy think tanks. Its also important to note for a hack to be successful or an attempted hack to be successful, it doesnt need to get into the system here thinking like russian what to inspire trust in the system. They can just rattle the door handle. They dont need to open the door all the way and thats why think theyve done in 2016 with the attempted hacks of our election infrastructure. Now we know as of last week or the week before that all 50 states were targets of attempted hacks. And what does it say to an average voter who is already worried about is not necessarily being counted or thinks the vote doesnt matter . Thats whats really worrisome to me. We can put up the strongest walls, but when those attempts happen thats what can aspire that distrust thats really difficult to overcome. Something that ginny said and i think you and i both picked up on his security by obscurity concept. I think i can apply to almost like a large part of the problem. Go beyond even hacks. That might get to the core of what really gets to why these are effective campaigns or not. We dont have really good studies on how successful maybe microsoft does. But the ones we do have are all like, you dont have to really target that many people within an organization, like less than 20 before someone will click. In academia, there are messages like dont click it. Emailing as come dont click it. Targeting academics come think tanks, this is another way of getting at Information Sources added and seen as credible or trusted. If youre trying to undermine trust in the system, you go after organizations that could be a trusted voice, talking about whats really happening. Its not a surprise. Our chief information secured officer is like our university gets hit all the time. We are just a couple of minutes before we open it up to questions, and you mentioned, we talked about deep fake early on. Something my call existing and have done some really interesting, really explain what deep fakes are, these hyperrealistic manipulation of video and Audio Content that is very hard to debunk and detect, especially just from the naked eye. Its interesting and terrifying. I think you said urine testing a problem of it. It almost seems like its knocking on the door, the problem with deep fakes and what that could mean, lets just say in 2020 if someone got, really started working on it. Weve already seen which is youre not using ai to do anything. Youre just slowing down every to change the perception of whats happening. You can manipulate video in some new ways that dont require using ai or synthetic media. We are seeing the effect of that simple application what happens when the ticket to the next level and have these very realistic videos, and its a question of how you from a technology standpoint address it. To your point about being able to pull images off because they have dna on them, we have figured out in many ways how to identify picture and they quickly grab it and put them. Video is a lot harder to do that the special nvidia keeps getting edited. With the christchurch situation in part is because the video kept getting edited into voice and that made hard to identify quickly to pull it down. Thats one example of what were going to see coming to technology is whole. Theres not a lot of research and funding that this got me to countering this kind of technology. Most of the Research Speakers and if it is is just starting. Darpa is doing uc berkeley is a program and avert some private companies that are really investing in that but its not there yet. Unworried about deep fakes but also worried about the very, very simple content that is still having huge impact on like were still seeing these memes that dont look like gare dedicating shared values of tons of people like yes, this is clearly true. Albert einstein definitely said this quote. Thats really scary. That goes back to the very simple education five steps of how to identify true or false. I was just think about how come you study online communities that the quote from the famous person, thats been spreading for years and 90 take, at least very alarming. That spread, imagine if you have a video of them actually saying it. I feel like we dont have the tools to deal with that and its pretty scary. Something to look forward to. Lets open it up. Theres a lot of questions. Jane. Im jane harman, again. I shouldve pointed out we have an allfemale panel. [applause] kate, you got to ask all the question but itll think anyone ask you specifically about the responsibility of media. Ginny was talk about cheap fakes which i sent one of them was this slowdown of nancy pelosi speaking wish you look like she was inebriated. When you saw that, you see in him, not just you, kate, what was your responsibility in terms of putting that on or just not putting it on the air and describing it . How fast the new cycle works, there are moments when things go from, i can see it on my twitter feed while im on said to they get in my ear and they say we need to go with this. I can be a matter of seconds. So there is, thats just me saying how fast it actually can move. That comes with a lot of risk and responsibilities. That the to specifically there was a real conversation. It happened really quickly, of what is this . Find the source. And then we get, it gets called out almost immediately, it was called up as a plated only do call it out as what it was. But it speaks to the larger issue especially in the post 2016 world. Of the response, responsibility of Media Organizations, just like any campaign of any citizen, making sure the information, making sure we know the source of information and taking time. I think theres kind of a collective thought of taking a breath and being responsible and thoughtful of what information we put at. How much we are amplifying one particular narrative of one particular story or one particular soundbite. Theres kind of how much priority and weight do we put on one story in a 24 hour news cycle and things are often repeated because thats nature of it, that theres a real conversation about it. Do we do it perfectly . Absolutely not. No one does but theres a real awareness and theres been a lot of soulsearching and kind of collective postmortem that a think hasnt not just testing in but in every Media Organization of how to do better Going Forward for 2020. However you want to do, anybody, whether your closeness to, just hand the microphone. Thank you all very much for being here on this panel. My name is cindy garcia and a working at the said and ive two questions. My first is from your research who do you think or he deeply are the most vulnerable populations to disinformation . Have you recognize any patterns . The second one is what are some actual concrete educational tools that we can use now to address these issues . Thank you. Yeah, so disinformation floor shoes and low trust environments. So anywhere there is no trust in media, low trust in the government, anywhere there is no shared Information Sources that are credible. So any country where people believe that there is one information source, maybe dont always agree with that but they think it is pretty much credible. Credible. There will be more resilient against disinformation. Places with any type of societal cleavages which probably describes everyplace, right . But in some places those cleavages, theres history of violence. Theres history of injustice. Anywhere like that also we talk about lower trust environments. Laces where people have lower literacy rates. Often we talk about Digital Literacy or Media Literacy or information literacy. Humans are usually very savvy consumers of information. So people will be prior to the transition starting in 2011, 2012, 2013 people, you didnt trust the media but they read it so they knew what to say if they were asked. They were not stupid or illiterate. They just have different strategies in that context. Different types of strategies can lead to different and more dangerous outcomes in some places. And on tools i always talk about reverse image searches. Just shorthands, the people here what that is . So all the less than half. Thats actually really good. A reverse image searches something you do it almost any Search Engine that just got downloaded on your browser. It could show you when the first known instance of that image is from the internet. When youre seeing images recycled, a lot of times for instance, the russian cup will use pictures from different conflux and wars to show really terrible scenes in syria or ukraine that are actually from years and years and years ago. You can rightclick ever using chrome whatever browser you use and search for this image and it will show you the earliest instance of the image and thats a really easy way if your spidey senses are a thing going to say is this picture really what im saying . Should i believe my eyes . The are a couple of other methods like that that a thinker easy for anybody who has a modicum of computer literacy. Good afternoon. Im with National American league of press association. I mentioned im a a veteran. I worked with units with the United States army. Disinformation is a tool thats always going to exist. Hackers are a way to collect information. In the cyberspace, different intelligence gathering to do this information. The United States has all this information. Russia had their own information. We have nothing to copy from the russians. Now, look what happened the obama administration. They carry out strong disinformation against the campaign of trump. Now lets be clear. What is this information what is misinformation . Misinformation could be its a mistake. But disinformation is crystalclear that its done on purpose and jeff information which means all lies, and great information which is combination of some aspects are true and some are like it my question is this. It is very sad that media like the washington post, the New York Times, the different network, cbs, nbc have this information to apply into the communities against a Political Party and favor of other Political Party. That is the big problem. Because information should be by the media crystalclear, should be to our informed and educated properly. But, unfortunately, it has become very popular in First Century to use disinformation within immediate. Why is that . I want to make sure i understand i understand your question clearly pick you are saying why the media is not, is using this information disinformation. Can human example. The biggest example use would happen with that the Mueller Report, what happened against the campaign of the trump. The whole meeting was involved. Every and not only that, many intelligence agencies and federal agencies of the United States government. Again, donald trump is what you are saying. Im going to disagree with you that the intelligence agencies were working against donald trump. I think the intelligence agencies have kind of laid out very clearly they were not working for any side other than gathering information in terms of disinformation. And i dont know an example thaf when cnn has been knowingly amplifying some disinformation to benefit any campaign i can promise you, i dont know if you watch my show or watch some of my colleagues shows, but thats the last thing that i wake up every day to do, the last thing that i want to do. [inaudible] thank you so much. Who else . National democratic institute, myanmar. You guys mentioned myanmar a couple times, specifically the need to counter information that is been used to stoke religious and ethnic violence. But but i didnt hear any mentin about the current internet blackout and i wanted to know whether or not on the other side of disinformation it could be used as an excuse to write laws that put a crimp on Free Expression like you major in europe, or to forward on censorship like whats going on in parts of africa . No, i think this is an excellent, an excellent point. Also myanmar ill think any of us making it we also have one of as a government where the government actors is also part of putting on disinformation. So i think this is one of the things about this like any issue that has to do with speech or expression is always going to be very messy, right . The questions where to ask about what type of speech should be permitted and shouldnt be, its never going to be a comfortable resting point that we come to. The use of internet blackouts is very, around the world and is becoming increasingly common, not just around times of societal unrest but also like during national exams. So using an off switch like that which effectively stifles a huge percentage of expression that is going on is something that we are seeing all over. And then we see in other democracies where that equation about freedom of speech a slightly different than here. Different types of loss appearing. As nina majored mitchard we sen germany and australia mentioned at all over. What we see of the countries as of the conceptions of what those rights should be, finding other ways in which those rights are being shaped. Because as we know, no right is pure. Theres always going to be tradeoffs that are made but i would absolutely guess the use of things like internet blackout is only going to increase as a way to both perhaps wellmeaning, trying to stop e flow of information that people think of leading to violence but also the way social control mechanism as well. Ive had an example from ukraine and if you want to learn more about the, i wrote a piece for atlantic about this discussion and the fine line between trampling on freedom of speech and protecting it, ukraine has been dealing with this question since 2014 when the maidan revolution begin and they started talking about websites. A black russian social Media Networks and on one hand theyre saying i dont is disinformation breading that people are being recruited to fight on the separatist side, the russian backed separatist side of the conflict. But there are a lot of worries when youre looking at it from a democratic standpoint. As a know someone from nbi would do, because what if the government changes and somebody then has the power of the pen to write a website off of the internet in ukraine for myanmar or another country . We dont want to use the tactics that the purveyors of disinformation are using in order to protect ourselves from disinformation. Up here. On fellow here at Stimson Center Wilson Center. I have a very particular question for you. Howd you address this problem in terms of remedy . In romania we had a lot of problems not only with the propaganda but with the [inaudible] i have thought about two possibilities. Ive identified the domains and the administrators of the domains, and im trying to find the Beneficial Owner in order to crack, you know, to prohibit the domain in order to think of the way of bringing these sections, at least before the prosecutors but in countries like romain or russia. In Eastern Europe usually we have corruption. Im thinking the propaganda also affects your financial integrity because they are paying. Im thinking if you have some best practices to share with me in terms of remedies. Because weve all seen the scholarship is pretty clear on that side, but in terms of remedies, we have to find a solution. Thank you. Solution to the its a big question. Certainly the Money Laundering question is intrinsically connected to this information disinformation. In georgia there were protests in june about russian influence in the country of course russia has annexed part of georgia illegally, but what people were protesting was a creeping russian influence through finance but then is replicated and amplified through disinformation. Somebody importing wine into russia would say why dont you put the stories in the news outlet that you own . Theres a lot of problems with a situation like that and i think the answer is more transparency. And im not a lawyer but i think transparency around ownership of domain names on companies and financial flows is something we can all aspire to and do better, and the United States and the uk had a big role to play in that that we weve not yet stepped p to. Anyone else . Thank you. The american cerutti project. Under research on disinformation and sort of the u. S. Role in countering it. Doing a lot of soulsearching on the ideas as well. I want to come to sort everything of a thing thats been echoed throughout this panel. Nina, you stirred up pricing basically disinformation is targeted of those who find most appealing. And doing some research on psychology and that sort of thing where people are fundamental in some ways receptive to disinformation, and even when told during basic site of experiments this is disinformation they had been exposed to, its false information they still dont change their minds. So how do we deal with this one were coming up with solution and realizing people are fundamental in some ways resistant to fax . So this is where i got very cheesy and talked about civics. The internet to some degree has taken away civility from debate, and as an alumnus of my High School Debate team, the more that we can inspire not only young people again, but all ages to have conversations facetoface, that way that emotion is kind of taken away where you have to measure what youre saying and understand that person on the other side of the twitter profile picture or facebook is a human being. The more that will get back to a really robust and productive conversation that i think sometimes thats taken away when we got computer screen in between us. Inspiring those conversations i think its something that governments and politicians have a role in playing. Getting out and speaking to constituents facetoface is important, and learning how to talk about the stuff which is i hope something im going to be working on in the coming months here at the Wilson Center giving politicians the tools to do that sort of work. And giving people the sort of tools to do that as well, thats part of Media Literacy, part of Digital Literacy. Remember that people are humans and we can have these conversations, whether its through a computer screen or in an environment like this. But it does get to the impact that even when people are told, youve been fed disinformation, how do you erase that from the . Thats one of the, like how do we solve that problem, right . I think through like nene is talking about like big systematic longterm effort which isnt a very nice like easily packaged policy thing here but a noticeably teaches a lot of students every year, what are the most interesting things that can happen as an instructor is to watch the Student Company to my class with a bunch of preconceived notions which we all have. We all believe things about the world. We believe things about how the world is ordered. Instead of me telling them that this is wrong or thats wrong, instead of having them do exercises and work that allows them to unpack their own police and understand what evidence comes from, how we produce knowledge, uc students have these moments where the often change their minds which they previously believed would just get lit up with sort of secret superpower 15th about trying to understand the world. And i think so the Education System itself, Building Work and at every level which a lot of people do trying to teach people how to take management of, how do we verify information is true or not come into their own hands. Certainly your right, the studies say we dont believe when were told something is not true, and we often will double down and us more about like our trusted networks and our Immediate Community that makes a difference. When i talk about why our programs exist and why we do what we do, i say this is a multi pronged approach. Unity government, Civil Society, academia, tack. Because reality is its messy. Theres not a simple solution to that question or any other ones that up in front of. There are little micro rules we can all play. We can get a ferment the screen screen and i to interact with some indifferent public us. We can learn from our professors and of the people around us. One thing we think about is how do we make sure with some of thats a search on our platform at the get Accurate Information. That is just a think we can do. Its a role we can play. We can make sure when someone is looking for where they could devote that the information that is upfront on the platform is the location they should go to vote at that weve worked with the secretarys of States Office or whoever to make sure we are actually putting that information out there. Theres practical things that can be done and theres some philosophical solutions but the reality is its going to be a combination of groups and individuals acting into the ways to try to get to that. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] the show continues. New panel is coming up, but wait, theres more. New nametags. Were welcoming one mail to the panel. Its okay. We can do it. So listening to the last conversation which was not cheesy, i was thinking about why the Wilson Center matters. Here comes the softball. Because we have panels like that and local points of view on the panel and from the audience. And were openminded and we try to put out there not one right answer, but a number of policy options that people should think about. And if we get you thinking more about things, we are doing our job and i think its a job that is desperately needed in this town where people seem to crouch in the corners and lob grenades. As i have said often from my nine trends in the United States congress, i learned a lot. I was honored to serve there, but then when i had opportunity to come here, i realized that so many of the things i wanted to do in congress were better done at the moment right here. Because what i wanted to do was think seriously about the heart problems, have people to help you with that. Because we all need help, or certainly i needed help and i still do, and then to come up with some things that would really improve, i hope, the quality of discourse and the quality of life around the world. And that is what we tried to do here. Its a little ambitious but we do pretty well and im very proud, just let you know, to be rated number one in the world in regional expertise. Thats just a high honor for the Wilson Center it has earned every single day at a very smart people who run our programs. Speaking of which, this program, in case you missed it, is part of our science, technology, and Innovation Program headed by make king who is hiding out in the court and is furious i mentioned her and touted her and she just another of the very bright and i think idealistic would be, what and represent what she offers. Right, informed, and caring people who are trying to make our world better. So back to the current topic, and now we go from the context that exists to the challenges that we face, our second panel will focus on the evolving threat of disinformation, which as you know we have not eliminated, including current challenges to social media platforms. In addition to deep fakes you all now know a deep fake and a cheap fake is, right . Racer had hit even dont know a deep fake anticheap fake is. Come on, guys. We did this together. Very smart audience. In addition to deep fakes, state and nonstate actors nowadays influence, infiltrated group chats and social media. We all know what group chats on social media are. And use fake get this fake Online Identities to seamlessly blend into a users newsfeed. Got that . What that means is, for example, in ukraine russians have attempted to rent the Facebook Accounts of ukrainian citizens so they can post political ads and circumvent facebooks regulations. Joining our second panel is katie harbath, director at facebook, and the former chief digital strategist at the National Republican senatorial committee. Welcome, katie. And we thank facebook by the way for supporting this event and future events that we will hold on this topic. Also joining us is david greene, Civil Liberties director of Electronic Frontier foundation, which is a very capable, nonprofit, dedicated to Digital Privacy and free speech. He brings significant experience medicating First Amendment issues in state and federal courts are so now we have a few more people to sit down drumroll. Second panel begins. Back to you. You guys are still stuck with me, sorry. So weve discussed and you guys are watching it as well, we discussed, we know whats happened. We know whats happening. Why is it so hard to prevent, to stop when it is identified and what are the challenges of tackling disinformation today a special and social media platforms . And the challenges of regulation and how there should be regulation, who should be regulated, who should be in charge of making these decisions . These are really big topics and these are to make people at the forefront of it. Thank you both for being here. Katie, first you. Facebook faced criticism after 2016 for being late to the game and slow in the response in 2016. What have you guys learned . What would you say youve learned from 2016 and sense . What is that put the challenges for your platform right now . Thank you so much for the Wilson Center for convening this and working with us on these issues. These are wines we cannot tackle alone. We are completely Different Company and what we were in 2016. Ive been at the company now for eight and a half years, and ive not seen such a big shift in the work and the focus of our company on a topic like this since when we did the big mobile shift in 2012. I was a this one was even bigger. Those changes include more expertise, expertise in everything from cybersecurity the threat intelligence, to also just local expertise on the ground. Because the problems that countries face, there are some similarities but theres definitely unique one for every single country in terms of what they may be facing. Sometimes its not foreign interference. Sometimes it may be domestic interference of what were looking at. Some of the things we knew going into this and we are definitely seen there is never going to be a fisheye. There is never going to be a point in time where we thought we solve this and lets move onto the next thing. Because we have gotten much better in terms of cracking down on more transparencies and et cetera. But as they mentioned, there in other areas. How do we make sure what is happening on the ground for instance with the right Mitigation Strategy that we can be doing for all of those. We are going in to the u. S. 2020 election, one of the things we are looking at and brainstorming is trying to think about what are the different ways that people might try to exploit the platform and what are the mitigation areas that we can do it also in the biggest challenge particularly is how do you define what is misinformation. And what should you actually do about it. This is a debate that i should be able to postpone this book that its on the left. But i dont remember the viewpoints being amplified. And were trying to think about for much of the information thats why we dont take it down but we reduced the morality and the articles so you can see alternative viewpoints of that. Not everyone agrees with the fact that they work with. Not everyone necessarily agrees that they are neutral and not everybody agrees with the fact check. Often times stories are mixture of choice in fact, how do you think about those, what are the penalties we should provide for people and we are trying to learn as we go. There is still a lot of disagreement overall in terms of how we should handle the conte content. David i went to get your take. You come at this whole conversation with a very healthy skepticism in government regulation and control. [laughter] the warnings, you say it here. The warnings are all over the place they are all out there on how American Voters are going to be facing more for this information rather than less in the coming election. As we mention the Mueller Report that one important part from the mueller testimony. He said theyre doing it as we sit here and over the course of my career and challenges of my democracy. The effort to interfere in the election is almost the most serious and this deserves attention of every american. You are one american saying what d. C. Right now questioning. What tracy in terms of role for government or the pot forms its a matter of one of the harm and we had to be very careful before we embrace the role for government that either decides truth and who can speak. In this election interference of many legitimate harms that weve had to confront over our democracy and make a judgment or had to say the government has a limited role. I dont think government should do nothing about election interference but what i dont think we can go and say be the ultimate arbiter of truth which i think is impossible to play in these situations. I dont think we use it when government especially are not able to speak. There may be a role, there can be a role that are established by the First Amendment jewish present and i think theres certainly things that the companies can do and should do and many of them seem to be dying to do. But i get nervous when we tried to put the government in a role of selecting speakers or selecting speech that deems to be appropriate. Its easier said, facebook, you guys are taking steps filtering and are probably using terms that are somewhat simple based before the government. Or any regulation put in place you talk about being open to relation. A couple things you found interesting. How do you determine the level of expertise youre bringing to this. That you have not before. Is that Human Expertise customer is that technological expertise . There is a balance between if theres an algorithm citing or if theres a human involved there. Isaac is a combination of the two and also important to remember that even Machine Learning and algorithms theres a human at the beginning of creating those. Beginning of a couple of examples where we look at that. 2016 when you look at the behavior happening on facebook most people are not using real accounts. They create fake ones. And we have a pretty good sense of what a typical new user on facebook looks like. I usually use my dad as an example. A couple tunes ago i got him on facebook and at first he only friended my mom and my brother. He did not post a lot right away he was figuring out how it works and they started using emojis and i regretted getting him on facebook. [laughter] but thats a typical new user. Where somebody trying to create a phase account to spread miss information or spread information quickly will since people right away who dont have much connection to one another in joint a lot of groups and like a lot of pages in the activity that they are doing is not typical new user so Machine Learning is a place where we can use that to try to flag some of the things that might say, this may not be who they are. And then those will go through human review where we might have enough signals to reconstruct theyre down right away and in fact we block both accounts at the moment of creation. Whether we block that. But for those that might be a little bit harder then reviews in the checkpoints and prove that your name is who you say this. Another area that says the protocol add transparency rules. So that is an area where were committed to support. And we have the tools to try to require people who want to run political or issue ads in the United States to have to protest to your who you say you are, add a disclaimer and put the ads into an archive. The challenges that we thought, if you think about typical campaignfinance law you start with actor. Your campaign, Political Party, we have slipped that around. We said if it talks about a candidate, the elections and the issue of National Legislative important as an actor you must decide this disclaimer. That has rapidly are very much expanded the number of actors who have had to go through this process on facebook that would not consider themselves typical political actors. It also causes problems with the Russian Organization who is not based in the u. S. And does want to run but are not based here. I think it is a real question in conversation we need to have versus nationalism versus globalism. And where transparency should play a role versus where you should stand stuff out right. If you can about what that the ads that they ran from the 2016 election, it was issues around immigration and polarizing. It was not necessarily vote for hillary or vote for donald trump. So thats an area that we think regulation can confirm what should be required in a long but weve had to invest both in the Technology Side of things to try to be able to identify those ads in humans to review this and make sure theyre actually in scope with how they define them. This was in 2018. The public on momentum for private companies can do something to more actively moderate the content that appears on their site is worrisome. Its worrisome even though i show the concern about this information, extremism, harassment. Youre concerned about Companies Like facebook or twitter moderating what is going on. Why . It is a lot of power to control who speaks. And we are concerned about government and for under legal reasons and otherwise we dont have the same legal concerns that i have won a pot from, im still concerned about influence on the democratic structures. The larger platforms like facebook and twitter and youtube hold a lot of power over who can speak and who gets to spread the message and who cant. I think they have a right to moderate the platform but i wanted to do so in a way that is consistent with human rights principles whether that be when they remove content that is well informed decision, its a transparent process, that person who posted the content is given notice and opportunity to appeal the decision. These are structures i want to see in place, there is so much pressure we see what the company experiences the pressure which is not moderating enough but attentive pressure in whatever topic it is this must be removing content and where the pressure is being inserted. There is a risk that companies are resource as facebook and the ones who cannot hire thousands of people who speak the language and be able to moderate content. That is the easiest thing to do with content. And it is very troublesome and i think we should lose a lot from social media if we go down that path you talk about working on elections and not just the United States. India is slightly more than the United States. What are your teams look like . For elections and how far they had her working together. How does this work for facebook . We have over 40 different teams and 500 fulltime employees, that does not include contractors and others that we have working on elections across the globe. In our ideal situation we start about 18 with the head of an election. We look at it and we spent time understanding the situation on the ground not only from the own employees but working with partners, iri, and others of understanding the risks that they may see. Understanding what may have happened on the platform and the last time they had an election in an order for us for the beginning to understand what risks they may have and what partnerships they need to set up with civil support into society partners. In which of our products doing need to fulfill gaps et cetera for that particular election. We will pull together that team that you see and they will work on it drop. I live in fear of snap elections, the uk is keep the car running election for me for quite some time. Italy is on the brink of having a snap election, israel is on round two this year and we try to keep an eye on this so they may get called earlier to make sure we are trying to monitor it and stay on top of it. The teams work on this since we have to keep integrating. We did a threat assessment 18 months before does not mean the same threats that are close up to election days. This is evolving process with all the things working together on a new daily basis of looking at these things and the last piece of an election will pull together an Operations Center where we pull everybody together in one room to better manage all of the escalations and things that we may potentially see happen during the election and take action. You mention the ways that actors are trying to exploit the platform. What are those ways . One of the main ways we see in combat is expression, anyone from wrong information and giving people the wrong election day, giving them the wrong roles around how they can vote the way they can vote. We take the information down, we saw in some places where people are spreading information, you can vote online and that is not true. That is why we work closely with the Election Commission where appropriate so we can ask them if we need to for clipper occasion but they can also flag content to us that might be violating local law that we can take action on. People might be trained to impersonate a candidate or create profiles that the things that the candidate did not say. We need to quickly work to remove those things as well and also a lot working with partners in the actual people participating in the campaign, the parties who may be wanting to run as or might be having issues or questions that they havent got answers to. Some of the disinformation is somewhat clearcut. Vote online, you cannot, that kind of stuff. But it does come down, in some way there are judgments that have to be made what is misleading, what is inaccurate, what do you do about that . From your perspective. [laughter] you come from a very important perspective, what do you do with that, how do you grapple with that when youre talking about how something can be amplified and how fast this information can move . Theres examples we can play around with. Theres information that starts the parties that the initial people shared among themselves and they understand is just parity and not meant to be taken as truth and to the community where some people think is parity but other people dont. What point does it become a concern . We dont want to say theres no parity on facebook. I do think anybody would be happy with that as a product or as a result of a democratic society. They are allowed to make fun of something youre not allowed to laugh. And by confronting them with clarity. I dont think we want that. There are things that are misinformation. Where somebody believes something to be true and so all these things sure the problem of what point is a trigger response. I dont have the solution and i dont think anybody does, recognizing that its nearly impossible as part of it. This is really difficult and the mistakes can be really critical and we get a lot from people that technology can be some magic box and im not a technologist but i work with many of them and i dont think that is true. I think as casey said, there is a role for a. I. The a. I. Is not a solution, it may be a sorting but we will get down to humans as we all know are valuable and make mistakes as well and katie said theres humans at the beginning of a. I. And humans at the end and their bias in the idea that a. I. Is biased or completely addictive, i think its incorrect. I dont know what the solution is but we need to acknowledge that its not easy. There are some situations where its false. Those are the easy situations. And to justify is probably going to be justifiable under service. There are other decisions. Those are the easy but i dont think those are the majority of the situations. To give an interesting example of one, reports of violence at the polls. That could be something that people are spreading to stop people from voting or could be true. That is the situation if we see that where we want to work with trusted partners and Fact Checkers on the ground so chin g to understand is in a violent or voter suppression. To understand what we should do if we make the decision in the wrong way that can have very bad consequences either way. We dont want to assume that because an Election Commission tells us its not true they may also have a case for not wanting people to think they are not handling the election click enter correctly. We want to be sure that we are being thoughtful as quickly as possible and thats where the real challenges come in with much of this work. The scale is really enormous. And these are the really hard things. Both of your perspective on. Even if youre shutting it down and is someone in legitimate users that are involved in this. Or is better is it is a balance that i think obviously facebook faces as well as anyone on control of the platform and im interested how you deal with the internally. So i think, we definitely struggle with it however, i do think that whether it is people are being influenced all the time. I think we cant necessarily say 90 days, 60 days, 45. One of the challenges we have and 20 think about how we can do this better even when working with partners it takes no time to say a lot but a lot of time to prove its ally. The Fact Checking occurs. How do you reduce some of those things. Do we give reduction of distribution before and let it go to the fact checker . It means less people receive newsfeed and they normally would. And what are the steps that we should take, to your point of finding the balance, i dont want to immediately take it off the platform and potentially put a backup if there is truth. There were potentially censoring and altering the democratic process. Is a hard problem and theres both reasons to be extra sensitive before an election where you might want to take down things because theres not enough time to correct something. But theres also the idea that their voice might be powerful for in election. And when we want to be sensitive to peoples right to speak. So you get the problem both ways and in regulating broadcast for example there are laws in effect sometime before an election. So it would not be in an unheardof way to deal with these things. Maybe theres something that the pot from can do with how they amplify things. We been could cause an organization. And maybe user controls and giving users some ability to control. Maybe that would do a little bi talk about the happy medium between censorship and my newsfeed. I think from a user perspective a lot of the problems is because people dont know how they work and make some difficult them to work the way they think theyre working and how they want them to work. So i think theres very few people to understand how they get information on facebook. Even though if you dig into it it can be explained. People use facebook for a lot of different reasons. How we use facebook in the u. S. Is really different from facebook and nondemocratic society. His role in organizing is so much different is so much more of a political tool. Wheelies make light of it but i find that my High School Friend has really crazy political views and they keep track of my friends lifecycle and things like that. But other parts of the world, facebook is how refugees keep in touch with the family and how political organizing happens. In identity policy with an inconvenience with the u. S. If you are not transit. Work could be a matter of life or death in society where if you reveal your identity your life might be in danger. Facebook is used a lot of different ways all over the world. Im a big fan of user control and you allow your platforms but we are using away they expect to use it. That is not a solution for every problem. I think when we talk about this information, with dads content people complain about, sometimes people see something they dont want to see in it up system or offensive or hurts them in some way. And then theres the neighbor content which i know its fake, i see, i criticize it. But i do not trust my stupid neighbor and im really concerned how they are going to do it in user controls are not going to help affect your concern. This is basic but important because it gets to whats to the responsible the of the company. To stop the spread of disinformation on the pot from. Is the goal to block you said youll never reach a finish line. But is the finish line for now to stop all the information from being amplified straight from the source . Is that it all a reasonable expectation or goal for facebook . I think its really a combination of things, i think for the things that are clearcut we are trying to stop it as quickly as we can thats like the wrong election dates and things of that nature. For the large majority will be in the gray area where we can trade guys examples and you all might have different viewpoints. Of is that false or not and what we should do. How do we think about and review things in the visibility to people and give them more context. There is still a lot of research out there in terms of what is the best way to help provide people with information about something in a way that they absorb it and not the way that makes them dig in even more in terms of believing what they believe. Also thinking a lot of the role of transparency. The role of transparency of understanding who is actually behind the page and what david said, in the u. S. People must think, why not. We should know who they are. But in many other countries that could put people at danger and i would argue in the United States that would make me feel very uncomfortable of junior staffers having their names out there that they could potentially be targeted by people because they did not ask for that. What is the role of transparency to have more information to make informed choices on this. Those are some of the areas of lovers in the balance between all those and we continue to go into 2020. It will evolve them with information we sat there for we are seeing, from. We want to bring more transparency its going to stop them or how people get a better sense. There is the ability to speak and ominously and protected under most International Law as well. And why somewhat theres a participation of productively to increase. And when they had ability especially initially who want to enter the democrat process and the ability to do that which is really important in the u. S. Supreme court has recognized the portable speech. So we have this value that is really important, and free wellintentioned efforts to provide the research with trustworthy information or not. The first panel we were talking about of what is the best defense of this Information Campaign. In education, education the public and the more people know that this information is out there and most are collectively combating it, do you see that is the best . On facebook as well . I think that the combination of what he wanted to mention before microsoft and all of this is not a collective or single problem for these platforms. It is going to be an effort by all of us. In terms to better understanding and helping people to think about this information and more critically in the information that they might see on the internet, it can be the role of perception hacking. So bad actors are trying to get somebody insane peers interference when there is not. Some people think it is happening even though it is not. So in 2018 we saw something that happened in expert to new better and knew how to talk to and think about it yet platforms that are working together to see the truth to present from the American Public at large. And what happened on the platform versus what the actors are saying and what theyre doing. I think itll be really tricky and we have to be very careful. We are going to want to make sure that were very careful of what is happening and not just them trying to make everyone think that is whats happening. I will join everybody else whos been up your and say im a big fan of education. I dont get solves the problem, theres a few reasons why amylin on education. One has a fuse number of conflicts among human rights values. Were talking about education and not how to balance somebody elses rights. We dont have to deal with all of those things. It is convenient in a really, really good way. In the other thing, one of our main goals is really about restoring trust. Having people be able to feel that they can make good decisions in education really helps because youre giving tools to have trust in their own decisionmaking process. They can still make mistakes and we know people making the decisions our people that can make different decisions. Were so important to have trust in your decisionmaking process. I am all in for education. Its an incomplete solution and does not get us all the way there. I like what facebook did with india election in terms i dont know how many people saw this, the shadowing and something had been picked up by being involved of a certain presentation and might even critical on why but i thought that was in interesting and having people take one more st step. Something that we have been what is the best way for presenting to people by Fact Checkers. It was a prominent overlay of people to see that and to try to get more information and solve the content. Right now, the evolution of this when we first started to do the checking we did a big red triangle with an excavation point. And then there is research worried about the backlash effects. It does not make them feel like they should look into this more. Then we started testing with articles underneath and had a green fact check on symbol next to and get more information. With different elections and try to see what is going to work the best or not. This is a different way of displaying that content might be false and how it can get to the fact checker story. Those are all things that we are looking at and of course bringing into the United States and continue to work on for a bunch of different elections. I thought there was a very low barrier to getting the content but it was applause. Another thing that we did in india because of the content and what was cryptic we did a Marketing Campaign called share joint rumors. It was a campaign that we did on tv and on the facebook platform itself and encouraging people to be thinking about what theyre sharing on whats app before the actually did that so we combine that with product pages that somebody could forward content with to try to combat misinformation there as well. You had something that all this discussion comes back to his trust. There is a historically low trust in the media right now. Historically low trust in institutions and government and everything. And there was a real hit in trust and social media platforms after 2016 and what exactly are we seeing, can i trust my eyes, can i trust my ears . And chris is the cofounder of facebook, he cashed out years ago. He republican came out to say in the New York Times to say he thinks that government regulation is the way he really wants to see the scope because he says that facebook cannot see and you cannot trust facebook. He was a cofounder. Facebook connect country make the changes needed because of lack of competition to get it right. His name is on the patent of the newsfeed and he says he does not trust. That gets me to the point of trust. How do, how do you get users to trust that facebook is using your information, moderating it to trust your pot from . I think that it takes little time and it can build a lot of time to build a backup. For anyone and all we can try to do is we work on it and try to monitor everything single election across the globe. You have the last six months india, io, israel, indonesia, a large amount of the world voted in the last half. There was things we did right and things we did wrong and we will keep improving on that. All we can do now is try to consistently deliver and keep Getting Better on these processes year over year of fear. The 2020 election will obviously be a big test for us but we cannot again i dont believe theres a finish line. This is a part of our Fiber Company in terms of what were doing and our goal is to make sure we are making this a priority and to be consistent and deliver on what we say we will, talk about where we make mistakes and where we need help and keep doing that over the long run so we can rebuild the trust. Thats an interesting question. I started asking myself, is it important that people trust facebook . Thats literally unrealistic. It is a future generated content. All they are doing is delivering content that other people write. And is it important that you trust facebook and want facebook to play a sorting mechanism as a user or do you want to be able to trust the people who are using. I think thats a different question. Im not saying italians to the education question. I think you need to understand about what facebook is and i dont have or want facebook except maybe false on every Single Person knows is false. I dont know if i want facebook to play an active role of doing that. I hadnt really thought about asking and sorting this out in my head. I want people to have trust in their institutions that produce content and i want them to have trust in the government and have trust in themselves and have the ability to make decisions. But i think it might be important if they have trust in facebook but i dont know is among the most important that i think that is good to have trustworthy. I dont know how critical it is again maybe that varies tremendously based on the user and how facebook is used. The challenges are clear, they are great you list off elections you been working on. There is a lot to be scared of in the lot to be nervous and fear and feel beatendown about when this information seems such a huge problem and everyone saying we cannot do this ourselves. Which leaves me wondering, are you hopeful, there may not be a finish line but are you hopeful, is this a solvable problem . I can answer like a lawyer, it depends how you define solvable. [laughter] i dont think at this moment in history nor in any other moment have we ever been able to say we will eliminate all false information or harmful information. I dont think we will ever get to that point. I dont think we have the tools to do it and it involves too many impossible questions to get there along the way. But can we reach a point where we can use these tools and a stable point where we feel like we can make good decisions not only ourselves but trust that her stupid neighbors and their relatives and other people whose decisions we dont like that even if they made in a goodfaith way, i hope we can get there. So, i am hopeful as long as we define our goal to be more realistic than false information. For me it goes back doctor y first job started in 2013 and facebook did not exist. Even then there was a great thought of how great an equalizer the internet could potentially be. In helping people to come together around causes that they care about, a way for candidates that would never be able to win the election otherwise to be able to get their message out to people and mobilize the local neighborhoods and rally around something that they want to happen in their neighborhood and do that via the internet. It is something that still exist and still happening. We did not do enough thinking about how it was going to be weapon nice and how the bad actors were going to exploit that. Right now we are in a period of time where we are having to play catchup. In refocusing on that and thinking about what are the processes and conversations we are having here about what are the right roles we should play versus others, what should we be doing this information. This is the conversation we are supposed to be having as a society and i am hopeful, i dont know when but im hopeful we will get to meet literalism there, we have trust that it is being mitigated and still being able to shine through. That is why i get up every single day and i keep doing this because i truly believe will be able to get to that point were just doing a lot of ketchup right now. Im another question but lets open it up because i know you guys have a lot of questions. Im john martin a Research Fellow and a retired Network Television correspondent. I want to ask moderator jane, im sorry, the question will from the question earlier. With the panelist are all answ welcome to enter. What networks should be taking to prepare and report this information . There are systems everyone is different but there are systems in place in standards and practices straight up to her boss where there is information before it hits air, there is a real conversation about what it is, whats the source when it comes to the new content or images, Audio Content, i would say there is probably an adequate programs that we have the check the digital footprint and things were talking about debunking. There is a lot of ketchup when it comes to those directions. But there are ways the nancy pelosi video and how that was modified. How images especially how images are changed and all of that is checked before it gets to air. Is it foolproof . I would say when it comes to this information and how in the post 2016 world, i think they did not do a good job. Because there is a lot of information that comes in and this is a conversation i would have, how much information comes in that we dont actually put out. There is a whole slew of backstops and checks in groups of people looking at it before it makes air. Sometimes at a moments notice but the systems are teams of people talking to facebook, talking to twitter, talking to Homeland Security department, fbi to get to a source if theres a real question about a certain image in a certain piece of information before we put it out. It depends on the situation and there are safeguards in place pray the problem is always looking up in the amount of time to get on tv. I have never been more confident for the work that were doing as journalist and this is cnn and beyond. There is a real responsible enough, im sure you feel a little bit the same way, the more responsibility it is to get it right all the time. And we are human and we make mistakes. But, i am really proud of the work that were doing at times when i know it became a tagline of apples and bananas and whatever. But i really do think were up to the task. Ross johnson. Thank you very much. The importance of an editorial process and in operation. Should that not apply to the part of newsweek that is news feed which is to say facebook has to take responsibility for content in that part of the operation and second, if it could lets think of a discussion about elections, it seems to me if i were a patriotic citizen of india or britain id be very unhappy with the rule that this private American Company is planning and i would want the Indian Electric commission or the equivalent in britain to be setting the rules for facebook or twitter or other social media in covering my election. So we know the chinese have it so we should do that and the russians. But what is a solution in a democratic country . So we were incredibly close with the Indian Electric commission during the election. There is a process and some of the other social networks tried and after being in conjunction with the Electoral Commission about things we would be doing we brief them up for products and what were doing and in fact they are in india and in order to run any ads they get it approved by the Electoral Commission and had to have a form from them. We made it so they were able to upload the forms and have those appear in the library. We also have the commission during our Operation Center and had a direct line to us. During blackout periods they would highlight to us as other things that they were seeing that they felt violated and the blackout and we would take a look at those and take the appropriate measures as need be and we were very connected to that partnership in the Electoral Commission was as well. The other thing that is very important are the teams of people, it is not just a publi h of people sitting in the United States and telling the countries heres what were going to do. We have quite a few folks who are on the ground in the local expertise working with Civil Society and others are very important in the folks on my team, from those countries when theyre working on those and that helps to build up the trust and also for us to make sure the u. S. Is the exception versus the rural and how the electoral process really works so its important to have that pool expertise. I think in terms of the other part of your question, the responsibility, i think it might depend on what is news feed and where people get their stuff from. Their friends or the most recent. As opposed to what facebook keeps you do which is news articles which are like a clipping service type thing. I dont think there should be illegal responsibly on facebook for anybody to edit, we dont have a legal responsibility for other news entities to have that. Many of them choose to have that for their own practices. I dont think we should impose that matter. By responsibility and the legal duty, then maybe its sort of depends on specifically what their trento compass. And what the expectations are of the users. Thank you. This information could be slow or reduced by making more work to share for example adding a confirmation screen which asked do you really want to share thi we actually do that. If something has been marked as false, first we send a notification to anybody who have shared it to let them know that it has been marked as false and to give them that information and if somebody shares after words and they happened to see it, there is a warning screen that says this is been marked as false, are you sure you want to share. The reason we allow them to share some people might be sharing it to denounce it and states false to give Additional Information so we want to make sure they have the ability to do that and its currently how the products worked. Thank you. Thank you for being here. I name is sarah and from the university of washington. I was doing a lot of work. Ive been thinking a lot about your team that you built up over the last since 2016. In thinking about whether youve encountered cases in which the case where facebook was the internet for citizens. Or cases where there is no independent media, there is no other but facebook is essentially the media force. And to what extent facebook has a good heart to heart and says, we need to back out of here because we are too powerful and too much of an influence in this place. Or i guess what im pushing on is the regulation question. Competition, democracy that is ritually diverse and has very vibrant media landscape and if facebook is 50 of penetration in a place or more, and you dont have the government regulating it and you dont want to be regulated and you say you are not media. You have what kind of special responsibility do you have, how do you do that, how do you self regulate . Is that possible and that the question for david, theres vulnerable populations for regulation, you are just not a freeforall everything, you cannot be the goodness of everything and you cannot just be good people, its about institutions. Yes we face them and a lot of different ways and shapes and forms. I think a couple of things. One, even in places where we may be the majority of how people use the internet, what is actually on their newsfeed can potentially be diverse and david mentioned about how many of these places this is the only outlet that voices may potentially have in a country. Then comes the question they will not have the funds to run ads and do the stuff so they will run through state run media and other things and overwhelm it. One of the things for instance we have done with the on transparency while we do have an exception for news media in democratic places, if your place that is strictly state owned media but not in a way of the bbc or hungry, they are not exempt. Theyre trying to read ads to their sites then they had to do the authorization piece and be transparent because we want to make it more transparent to people of what theyre trained to do, who is seeing the contents et cetera. I think this is exactly the right conversation to have and is that enough, i dont know completely pulling out and shutting down is the right answer to that, and i think we need to keep trying and thinking about different ways to find the right balance. I would not want to see facebook not present in less democratic societies. I thank you all know this. It became known to me when a few years ago i represented a news entity that we would say from cause exam that they had been banished from kazakhstan and the reporters who remain there had to report and ominously under a threat of death and the government did a really good job of keeping their publication out of kazakhstan except facebook. The only way they could get their news into the country was by publishing on facebook because apparently have the government banned facebook and the populace would not have accepted that. And to me facebook plays a tremendous role in giving and having people access to voices or otherwise be in from the country and certainly, i dont think youre suggesting this but i dont want a regulatory system where the regulator is completely not trustworthy as it would be in a repressive regime. I dont want ray literally systems anywhere and certainly not an a nondemocratic body. I do think this is up whether its facebook or the private company that finds itself in this role to recognize explained this Important Role in the taken ethical responsibility to do that, we and others including others in this room were highly critical of facebook of being two hands off and this was before the big transformation that they responded to slow. To me 2016 election wasnt as much as a turning point. We keep on mentioning you call the philippine station its what happened in places like that were facebook and others were just not having the human tools to make the decisions that are being put in a position where theyre getting a ton of request from the government to take down content and not have the ability to i like what facebook is trying to do now. I think recognizing that your plane the role is important thing. I dont know if im agreeing or disagreeing. [laughter] agree with her. [laughter] my name is monica im with the state department. I recently went to a panel uncovering violent extremism. I look at that very similar in terms of how polar lysing politics has become in the u. S. In the messaging on cb. My question for you guys, as i happens we are creating chambers for ourselves on facebook and social media platforms. For a while there was talk that facebook would create an algorithm to add a little bit more diversity to peoples speeds, one of the folks who is talking about the radicalization of extremist said i got stuck. I do not know there is anything else. I think politics is similar right now so encouraging dialogue which is talked about in the first panel, educational tools, what can they do to add more . I think that is a great point and theres a lot we can learn that we been doing to bring to the space. There has been quite a few studies in terms of showing your facebook may not be necessarily as filtered as we may have initially thought because if you think about your regular life, david has his neighbors who are sharing the stuff any mice see some of that on facebook and sometimes people might be selfselecting as well as not just happening online but if you read the really great books that came out of 2016 whether politics or resentment you talk about how cities over time and people becoming affiliated in their cities and neighborhoods. How they choose their news outlets and all that. It is not its not as simple as showing people Additional Information to get them to think about this. I think we have to think about tackling this in a couple of different ways. How do we think about the news sources or related articles that we are showing people. In terms of civil discourse i know you are talking about this, one thing we found that is changing when we had Facebook Live we would get remarks from campaigns and people are much nicer here. I think thats because they know its live in they see a person. When its as close as facetoface you can get about the comment you are sharing with people then commenting in the newsfeed. What controls should we give people were running pages for these things to try to help people save somewhat civil. Its tricky how you do that in a way that you dont go to censorship. Thats where it is been hard with the gray lines of what we have and theres a lot we are doing. We still do education stuff, election day reminders and showing people who were on their balance and try to make sure they have Accurate Information on those types of things too. I think we will have to keep trying a lot of these different ways to tackle the problem overall. You see that and post 2016 and how the journalist approach, i and other journalist approach with information put in front of us. There are certain things that we are faced with that or not on the other side of the debate when it comes to extremism, White Supremacy theres not another side of the debate that needs to be out there. That post 2016, i think there is more of that recognition than we had in the past and i think that is i am happy with that change. Is the perfect all the time, no. Is it silencing voices . My show is not a platform that white supremacist ideology needs to be on. I think we are seeing that play out in what we do on tv and online and in your papers as well. I think we have education campaigns and one of the things that consumers should be educated about is getting news from multiple sources and i dont think facebook is being a platform for multiple sources. Yet to go outside of facebook. A few years ago people used to say what are your suggestions we want to make sure were getting good information. If you have the memes to do so pay for your news and paper the news that you think you agree with and the things might be the opposite side as well. So, with thick a lot of that is what the tools and facebook aspires to be the place in the control of their users with complete information. I dont agree with that model. I am not accusing katie of advocating but i dont want to be that. One thing in one of the great things about the internet thats allowed people to find Community Around the world. I just want to make sure and unjustified rush to get people out of their bubble that we dont lose the sense of community and theres something really valuable of people finding her experiencing the same things as them and they may agree especially if their views are unpopular where theyre located. I think its another challenge trying to develop. And something really valuable of finding your bubble. Thank you so much. David it is great to meet you. And thank you for your questions. The call so much for coming. Stay tuned for a deeper dive in the fall of early 2020 for hostile solutions. If you would like to learn more look for a series of white papers detailing examples of this information and more history about the challenge. Thanks to our partners for making todays discussion possible including facebook, university of washington. They stand for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] watch booktv for live coverage on saturday august 31 starting at 10 00 a. M. Eastern our coverage includes author interviews with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her book my own words. In his book is the heartbeat of wounded me. Sharon robinson talks about her book child of the dream. Rick atkinson also the british are coming. And thomas malone, founding director of the mit center for collective intelligence discusses his book supervise. The National Book festival life saturday august 31 attending in eastern on book tv on cspan2. The president s nominee to be the next director of the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives testified before the Judiciary Committee per he answered questions from lawmakers and many considering his opinion on the 1994 federal assault weapons ban. This is two hours. Hallway tv is a must see. An