To City Lights Book publishers. We are thrilled to have Samuel Woolley with us celebrating a very important book called the reality game how the next wave of technology will break the truth. It is from our friends at Public Affairs books. Samuel woolley is a writer and researcher specializing in the study of ai, emergent technology, politics, persuasion and social media, assistant professor of the school of journalism and Program Director for Computational Propaganda Research at the center for media engagement at the university of texas at austin. Samuel woolley founded and directed the Digital Intelligence lab at the institute of the future, 50yearold think tank based in the heart of Silicon Valley and cofounded and directed the Research Team at the computational propaganda project at Oxford Internet institute at the university of oxford. He has written on political manipulation of technology for a variety of publications including wired, the atlantic monthly, tech crunch, the guardian, and many others, his research has been featured in the new york times, washington post, wall street journal, also made appearances on the today show, 60 minutes and frontline. His work has been presented to members of nato, the u. S. Congress in the uk parliament. It is an honor to have him with us tonight doing this important research. Please give him a warm welcome. [applause] hi, everyone, great to be here. Hearing my bio it sounds kind of fake. It has been a wild ride. Im really happy to end in san francisco, specifically at city lights. Thank you for having me. I couldnt think of a better place to end this tour. To talk about a book on democracy at the end of the day in the ways we reimagine and rebuild technology in a technological age. A lot of people assume when they talk to me about my work that i am a Computer Scientist and that is not true. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a long time i thought maybe i should try to play the game and say i took a few classes, i know a little bit about html but at the end of the day im the kind of person that studies what i study by talking to people. I spend time in places, spend time with people and i go deep and go deep on subjects and so for the better part of the last decade i have been going deep on the subject of computational propaganda. It is a fancy term for the ways in which automation and computer codes, algorithms and things like that get used to manipulate Public Opinion. What weve seen in the last four or five years during the brexit referendum, in india with recent problems caused by whats apps, offline violence, weve seen social media become used as a tool for manipulation and disinformation. A lot has changed. We had up perspective that social media was going to be something that would be the savior of democracy. That is shown through googles phrase do no evil and also showcased by work about digital utopia and cyber libertarianism. That is not where we are now but we are not lost. Everything is not lost yet and this is not just a book about how screwed up everything is and how scary the world is. It is a book about solutions. Every chapter ends with a solution, the conclusion is a Solutions Oriented chapter and after spending nearly a decade working on this i realized there are a lot of things we can do. I will end on those things. Lets talk about storytelling and what it means to be an ethnographer, somebody who studies technology by talking to the people who make and build technology. I will introduce you to four people, four places and four ideas i learned in the last several years. These four people, places and ideas have been instrumental in how i wrote this book and been thinking about technology. The first person is named phil, my advisor who the book is dedicated to, my phd advisor and director of the Oxford Internet institute at the university of oxford and phil took me under his wing when i did my phd at the university of washington seattle. Phil at the time had been studying the arab spring. He had been in tunisia, in tunis studying people using technology to communicate about democracy, to organize protests. He had written the book with oxford press called the digital origins of dictatorship and democracy and discussion in this book was about the ways the internet played a role from the beginning of the internet going public in countries first facilitating dictatorship and democracy for helping people to realize freedom, to realize control. Phil was talking about these things very early on and i had just come from being a fellow on the Obama Campaign in 2012 and become enthralled when i was working on a campaign, the way they were making use of data. I was blown away by how sophisticated the campaign was. And the storytelling aspects. And the Obama Campaign on the side of the voters. And the massive amounts of data with personal stories and humanizing the data, to reach people in the resounding message of what is hope. When i met phil, phil taught me something important, something that bears saying to all of you which is technology and Politics Today are inherently connected. You cant have one without the other and to some extent if you think of technology is simply tools, media and the way media is used to community with people about information on behalf of others this is always been the case but in todays World Technology and politics are very much intertwined. The campaigns that do the best around the world these days are the campaigns that have the most technological savvy. The reality, not to overuse the phrase on the front cover but the reality is if you have a lot of data, if you can marry it to a sophisticated ai system you can do specific targeting to people and speak to them in a way they would like to be spoken to. So phil, in seattle, university of washington taught me that people and technology are intertwined. The next person i want to introduce you to is a person named andrew. I met andrew in england and took a position at the university of oxford. I got grant money to study computational propaganda in 2013 and the European Research council and they wanted to know how russia and other countries were using social media to influence Public Opinion. Do you want to come to oxford, i was in oxford with you. At a conference, standing around, still am scared about it. Conspiracy theorist often wants to talk to you. When random people approach me and know who i am, are we going to talk about aliens or flat earth or antivaccine stuff and am i going to have to carry on with you . The fact is i dont know how to talk to you about that stuff. I actually make and build automated profile on social media for the labour party in england. On behalf of the labour party they dont pay me to do anything about it. Lets talk, strike an unlikely friendship, the ways in which people can use to amplify voices online. The use of campaigns to look like people are profiles, they arent people, they are automated profiles. They can use these accounts to retweet messages, the evolution of Machine Learning, ai, to talk to people in more sophisticated fashion. The technology doesnt exist on its own. Social media firms would have you believe the algorithms are apolitical, dont have value or make decisions in a way no one could have figured out or decided upon, and in new england, something called social media collective does fantastic open work. The algorithms and software always have human value in them. If you train a Machine Learning tool and what you have to do is go through a process of tagging the data and you have people do that. If all the people who tag the data are white men, then the algorithm ends up being privatizing were bus lines go in a certain neighborhood, turned out to be racist. Suddenly poor neighborhoods or neighborhoods of color, where the bus goes, places that need free passes for the bus and up not getting as much bus is coming through and that is a tool encoded with human values. Bots are the same thing. You amplify information, use social media to be late Public Opinion, when social Media Companies to prioritize certain information there is politics a, decisions that go into the process, if i had a dollar for every time i heard social Media Company say we are not the arbiters of truth i would have 10, 000 because they dont want you to think they arbitrate truth but im here to tell you that is not the case. Trending algorithms that prioritize information that people curate information or prioritize the things you see. The longest time and even today organizations like google, facebook and twitter made decisions about how to prioritize news to people. That matters. This book is about that. Andrew taught me you need to look at the person behind the tool. It is not enough to do quantitative research, to download a ton of data, do the Data Analysis but all know about what they are building, why they are building it and who they are doing it for. You might think if savvy political campaigns are doing this work, turns out when you dig down deep you find shadow we pr firms, market organizations that say i can build a social media profile and add 10,000 accounts in the next few weeks and surprise surprise what they are using his fake profiles, fake information and it is a weird world out there. The third person i want to introduce you to is a woman named marina who was my boss at the institute for the future. I met marina after trump won the 2016 election, first time i had been to the institute of the future in palo alto and they flew me out for a roundtable with a bunch of Research Scientists and politicians from the state department who are concerned with the weaponization of ai. At the time, ai hadnt been weapon eyes the way people thought it had. There were not smart ai bots talking to people to change their mind about politics but more ai was used by the algorithm, manipulating Public Opinion but marina listened to all the experts speak at very astutely in her way said at the end talk, this is a continuation of kgb tactics, she grew up in ukraine during the firm of the soviet union and she said what we need to think about isnt we dont need to think this propaganda is new because it is not new, tactics are new. Things we are seeing our continuations of things we have seen for a long time. It is the technology and the way the technology has been leveraged that is making this more potent. We see automation and anonymity. Epidemic in this country and the term fakeness has been a weaponize by people who spread fake news. I challenge you from here on out if you want to know how you can be part of the problem is misinformation at which means accidentally spread or dis information which is purposely spread false information you could say mall information which means bad, stupid stuff. Junk news. The terminology matters, history matters, and its no surprise to me, the returns that have studied this stuff she wrote a great piece called the lexicon of lies, all about the ways we talk about propaganda, its no surprise that people who spread these lies are taking on own terminology in making the same exact arguments about when you point they figured them there saying no you are doing this. Thats exactly the playbook. The playbook is not necessarily dips lay can change peoples minds is to create confusion and apathy. Its to make people mad and polarized. Thats what we miss a lot of the time we think their sophistication in the sense that theyre coming and talking to us in making is interested in owning a gun, thus no other doing there they are to make you not want to vote, not to engage in democracy, to think the system is broken you are so angry that use vote to so many speaks to your anger versus someone who access policies. So we got a look at history. Marina is actually right that this comes out of the soviet playbook. One thing you should also know is the russians are the only ones who do oppositional propaganda. Think it benefits a lot that they are the owens you propagation all that talk about its the thing that only happens to them parent competition all propaganda is informational happens in nearly every country around the world. There is a reporter my ultimate oxford that suggests during elections and over 70 or 80 countries 70 or 80 country cimmaron that ballpark, this has been a weaponize by governments and campaigns. It also happens domestically, domestic actors do this is fitted almost anyone can do at this date in effect my next book its going to be from your scholar read this with even more boring. [laughter] manufacturing consensus its a riff on trumps consent in the book behind that book so we use these to create the illusion of popularity the more you make it look popular the more it seems like a viable idea. Okay one person the last place less idea. The last person to scaffolding, she is my boss out the university of boston shes formally of the near time she was a dining editor and before that she was a sports reporter. I dont how you make that transition left as kathleen. She is fantastic. What i went to ut, i had kind of lost a little bit of hope because of everything that is going on, because i had been writing this book and thinking about the ways in which the informational system is broken. But it work at the school of journalism at ut. And kathleen is the director. Kathleen has taught me that we need to place faith in the institutions we arty have. We dont need to create brandnew things. We have the federal Elections Committee get the federal Communications Commission we dont need a federal disinformation commission we dont need one more thing to do that in washington. More specifically we need to invest in journalism. Journalism in this country has done amazing things. There are so many people that work for great publications around the United States that what to do good work and want to protect democracy. They are still having to learn on the fly in fact in the book i talk a lot about the ways in which journalism has not just been challenged by the digital era its not like they are individuals or organizations that cant handle the digital era its organization like google, google news, youtube, facebook, twitter massively benefit off the work of journalists that giving any renumeration or money to these folks pray the same can be said like wikipedia, when youtube faced the crisis of disinformation what to do . It started leaking wikipedia articles with a name talk to wikipedia which is a nonprofit et cetera nonprofit and youtube is using it as the resource that youtube sent people to with this information. Same thing goes for journalists. Google news for the longest time gives snippets of articles among people started researching it, you couldnt click through to the actual article youll had snippets. We click the actual article, or the Research Showed that no one actually read the full article. No one actually clicked through they just read the little piece until the journalists put all the work into during this investigation, writing the whole article, google post the article, snippet, nobody actually reads it. And we wonder why the news industry is failing, whites having a hard time worried maybe failing a death wrong word. What i think as we can reinvigorate journalism and not let the cat out of the bag too much amidst exactly my argument is. The argument is that the Technology Firms around the country, should have to put i dont know 10 billion or 20 billion into it public trust in the United States and let that be overseen by some Society Groups people have a stake in making sure the money is spent wisely and well. Google news labs has committed three hunter 50 million or so to the google news initiative. Google gives out that money they make partnerships with organizations, they make decisions about who gets it and who doesnt. For a long time ago has done when they have experienced a backlash about the policies of the algorithms not prioritizing full articles, they have deep prioritize the new sites that have complained. And so that is not good enough. The Technology Companies have helped create this problem and they have admitted to it. Theres a big mia coppola mogul it was on Mark Zuckerberg saying before congress he did some bad stuff, they have a hand in that thats kind of our fault, but that went really given back. They havent systematized this problem. Theyve done some things, and they have been working hard in many ways. But its not enough. Its really important that we remember these are multibilliondollar companies. Some of the Richest Companies in the world. They get treated more like nationstates these days and they get treated like a regular company. So, kathleen taught me to it reinvest in journalism and to be skeptical of what we see today. And to not think, like i said earlier that journalism has failed theres a lot there. With all these things in mind, all these things taken together, live a really interesting picture. And we have this book. This book is actually book about the future. I talk about what weve been through but this looks to the next wave of technology its about fake videos its about a ites but Virtual Reality its about automated voice systems like just like a person like google duplex and it thanks a lot about the ways in which these next wave of technology will make way for more disinformation. The subtitle is provocative for recent supposed to scare people best Case Scenario you will prove me long you will not let Technology Break the truth this is must be a warning at a provocation. And bergen into reading them organ and with solutions in a q a. Conclusion with human rights and my, finding solutions to the problem posed by online disinformation and political manipulation adopting task. The disinformation landscape is vast. And extends beyond our current ability to track it or contain it effectively. Moreover the internet grows larger every day. According to a 2017 report, on the state of the net from the Software Firm which conducts Indepth Research and news outlets, we create 2. 5 quintillion bytes of data every day. 2. 5quintillion outlive note that number means. Users grew by 1 billion which is 3. 7 billion users from 2012 to 2017 the internet grew by a billion users. E of the Data Available the world was generated in the previous two years. Let me think that in, 90 of the online Data Available in the world was generated in the previous two years. This means that people are working to gain Public Opinion exert social and political assertion using online tools have almost imaginable amounts of Data Available on potential targets. With no information beaming out to them every millisecond. They also have access to a lot of potential targets and can leverage online anonymity, automation, the sheer scale of the net to remain nearly intractable. Important ethical and legal considerations along with the possibility of finding a skillful operative, make prosecution a poor strategy for stamping out computational propaganda. Instead we have to fix the ecosystem is time to build, design, and redesign the next wave of technology with human rights at the forefront of our minds. Thinking about responses to the rising tide of reputational propaganda, i find it helpful to break them down there responses for the shortterm, longterm, mediumterm usually consider tool or technologybased responses to be the shortest term fixes of all. Many of these efforts are bandaid look it triage of the web 2. 0, such amendments include little tweaks to social media news algorithms. Or the code that identified trends or Software Patches to existing tools. They include new applications for identifying junk news or browser plugins attract political advertisements for these efforts are useful as far as they go but online media spiel asian tactics are causally evolving. What works to track this information on twitter today may not be very useful to your from now. In fact, many of the applications that have been built for such purposes quickly become defunct going to code level changes made by the social media firms. Lack of funding or upkeep or propagation jet pageant siding lace again then. There are useful products at this time like bought check they used to used to detect propagation of propaganda on twitter using ones browser. These programs need to be constantly updated to stay relevant to say useful. They prompt a promising start that alert users to the threat of misinformation but they must be combined with actions and technologies when you firms news organizations and others in order to really be truly effective. Another example or propaganda tracker dms, subtract alleged accounts. Although its important to report social media traffic, and equally important to notify users that they may be encountering false news reports, these efforts are too passive and too focused on user based fixes to counter propagation of propaganda. Also, its important to remember a good deal of Research Show post hoc fact checks, do not work on that social media firms are engaged in a constant battle to catch and delete the types of bots, cyborg and human based information operations. More than anything though, i want to communicate in this chapter that everything is not lost. Not only researchers policymakers and civil Society Groups around the world, but also the Technology Firms. They are fighting for the tide of digital propaganda. Employees of facebook have managed to dismantle predatory disinformation, disbarment of advertisements on topics from payday loans, to which candidate should get to vote. Coolers have stood firmly at shady dealings and Drone Research and manufacturing prudence also occurred to me that todays large tech firms have to get real with themselves. They are now Media Companies. Purveyors of news, curators of information, and yes, arbiters of the truth. They owe a debt to both democracy and the free market. And their allegiance to the latter doesnt mean they can ignore the former. So one of the things you might not know and you probably dont know, is why would you, is that the English Version of the book is subtitled how the next wave of technology will break the truth and what we will do about it. For some reason, it did not make the american version due to editorial decisions. I really like what we can do about it. Im going to tell you a few things we talked about the shortterm, mediumterm longterm. Down the short term, the best thing that you can do as people are pretty simple. They are to read the whole article, and im not being facetious. I think i, myself the other day caught myself tweeting that article i hadnt read the whole thing. Im like what am i doing . Why am i doing this . I studied this i should know better than this. One of my closest friends who did a phd with me at the university of washington, it was brilliant got a message saying that they, i dont out them, had shared a known pieces of russian disinformation on tumblr through the agency. This is a person that studies the stuffy nose it really, really well. If they can be fooled by it, if i can be full but, then we can all be full by. So we have to read the whole article and we have to think very jim very carefully before we share we share. What we are seeing right now isnt the proliferation of cheap fakes during the 20 election its not things that make trump look like he same thing is not coming. Theres more chapter on this forcing his regular people sharing videos that are edited on iphones videos of joe biden looks like a racist because its likely edited. Videos of nancy pelosi looking like shes drunk. Looking at what High School Students looking like seven have that didnt happen. In the one of jimmy costa that was sped up to make him look like he was abusing the white house intern. But then got us press credentials revoked and subsequently reinstated through some weird strange episode of mr. Magoo. And save got to be careful about what we share, we all have. The other thing people can do is talk to the people they love and the people they care about. I just read a report for the National Endowment for democracy in d. C. Is called the demand for misinformation. The main take away i got from that report i wrote it with colleague katie joseph she deserves a lunch of the further her work. The big take away i had was the only way people change their minds when it comes to these kinds of issues and what comes the polarized nature United States at the moment in other countries is a talk to people they care about and love. Too psychologically dont change your mind based on a conversation have on facebook you dont change your mind based upon an argument that you had with someone you dont know. Needs to be a conversation with someone whose civil and it needs to be about a topic you care about. That needs to be conveyed. So those are shortterm things. In the mediumterm, we need policy. We need regulation. Am so sick of hearing from people this is just a user issue and selfregulation is going to solve this. We cant just let google, facebook, twitter and the powers that be make decisions internally about what theyre going to do. What ends up happening, when thats the case, is it they say researchers like me hey, your research is flawed. Its not scientific. And i say when you mean its not scientific and they say you didnt have all access to the data we had. You didnt have a representative sample, and thats ao well maybe you could share with me whole data set . And then i will do the analysis how about that . And theyre like yeah well figure that out. And they have this thing called social science one that supposed to do its not really happening. Theres no one holding them accountable so the only federal commission theyre not going to look at any political communication during elections. Online. Look at tv radio looking thats problematic the government has a huge role in this and the government needs to do something currently nothing will get done there waiting before a less polarized congress right now this much appetite to it. However we can look to other countries, we can look to other places throughout the world to look at where theyre dealing for this problem is also some countries in south america, and then, theres a long term fixed in a book theres a tagline of got to design with democracy in mind if got to design with human rights in mind. My belief is the platforms were used today its just effective design for engagement theyre designed to get people to scale, to grow to massive sizes. We dont have to accept that thats not something we asked for it something that exists that is now infrastructural in our society, facebook has over 2 billion users. They were also designed to make money at the end of the day. And what happens when thats the case . I think we get what we have now. Forgotten what they built but they built as a system did not prioritize highquality information, engagement, civility. They built systems that prioritize the opposite of those things. And so i have a belief thats possible to actually create technology and the intrusive democracy and human rights receipt with things like macedon to some extent they really guided me on this its a game designer and the author of reality is broken created the ethical oes, you can find it for free at a told i ts had a hand in that gives technologists how to think about the problems that could happen that knowledge of their building it kind of a toolkit to think through things. Introduction for science at stanfords music, with talks about using it talk with other organizations about how they could leverage it theres questions the longterm is hard to think that public thinking Public Schools we have to invest in Media Literacy in Public Schools. Its not fair the people based problem. We have educational institutions they dont really give you Critical Thinking into the its a college lot of us dont get there. In the 1950s a bunch of foundations in the United States create a Public Interest law because it basically didnt exist then reported he didnt get a lawyer. You might say to some extent thats true today and id say yeah youre right weve come a long way. Cant always have the best and brightest going to google and facebook to make a ton of money because they think theyre going to do something good, theyre sold that line. Made the best and brightest also going to nonprofits need people to understand technology to be helping build legislation, we need people to understand code to be helping build the legislation how we litigate competition of propaganda will Dianne Feinstein local hero called the bod and accountability abuse act is put before congress or before the senate a year or two ago was laudable, it was also not feasible at all. Fix a dont think technologists had looked at it. The bill is written much more infrastructural to the web half of all international comes from automated accounts that probably would not happen we studied germany, around 2016 during their last election, their election then, we thought we would find a lot of people sharing this information but we didnt. And we are wondering why the heck that was. We knew the far right in germany had gained a foothold and become very powerful. We quickly realize was germany had a really robust public media system. Germany had a robust purple Critical Thinking in Public Schools. After world war ii with what german expanse of nasis, germany made it illegal to talk about White Supremacy and things in the public domain. Theyre very, very afraid of this country think about hate speech because we are really concerned with free speech, rightfully so in some ways. But we cant always treat the First Amendment as if its at odds with the right to safety and arranges security. Weve got to figure out a better way. In the introduction to this book, i begin with a quote she was in the east bay shes in her late 90s, shes a park ranger at the rose either report museum and she is amazing. My wife took me to it see her give a talk was kind of reluctant to go. And i found in tears at the end of the talk because one of the most inspirational speakers ive ever heard. It was so amazing i highly recommend looking her up on youtube she said this in an entry with an let you asked some questions. Every generation i know now has to recreate democracy in this time because democracy will ever be fixed. Was not intended to. Its a participatory form of governance and will have the responsibility to form that more Perfect Union you think you so i think we can all be happy to manage it some shy anyone . So enjoyed the book, and your talk for sure ive a comment than a question first off like the emergent component into me you active stuff in the 50s as you scaled these things up is the emergence of some of the stuff that does render them kind of thinking about the deep protection stuff. But if human years we will be able to do it for sure in five years maybe ten years optimistically. But like ultimately a lot of these techniques are asymmetric to the theater. Im think thats really something kind of important gets lost in some of the discussion. And the other question i want to ask about, wasnt what you brought up, kind of in the book a lot of this blame gets put onto the people that are Voting Solutions which i agree with i totally agree its techno libertarian thinking when it comes to who is building these platforms and algorithms. But ultimately, to me, those systems are just answering to a ceo that answers to a board, the answers to shareholders. And so to me, really, all of this is symptomatic. It symptomatic of capitalism driving his at the base. Im wondering how you see solutions existing in this kind of model . s the first point is the point on emergence is well taken. To get into the heart of that for everyone else, we see disinformation and computational confrontation its also disinformation when they begin. They are purposefully spread false information intended to manipulate. They become misinformation very quickly. And so when i worked at google jigsaw is a fellow for your comment was interesting, kind of inexperience it really shook me. What they called it was seeding and fertilizing and basically plant the seed and then you fertilize it and then you let regular people do the work and spread the propaganda for you. And so it is difficult to track. This there is a kind of problem of where the snakes mouth begins and where it ends. Its a metaphor. I think with the second question, so yes, this is a problem of capitalism and the free market. Theres no way to get around it. When you prioritize for profit, you prioritize systems that take advantage of people and not out myself but my mass is in Cultural Studies so i spent a lot of time thinking about the stuff. I believe that serious changes have to be made but i dont think we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we have now may be the best bad system i have. But when i read the quote gives me hope that democracy can look different. In different generations but i dont quite know what the answer is. I cant really answer your question i wish i did have the answer is out act like i didnt know anyone and probably just leave. We can rebuild democracy in a different way. Maybe we need to speak the language of the market recent event im talking to people on facebook and google maybe it will be Good Business for you. Too actually do something thats beneficial for society. Think about that. How do we market this is Good Business. Other questions . Anyone . All right. Thats great. Short and sweet. Thats by far the shortest and sweetest of all them. Thank you, thank you very much for having me, this was great. [applause] so as a coronavirus continuous impact the country, heres a look at with the Publishing Industry is doing to address the ongoing pandemic. Upcoming book festivals and conferences have been canceled with book fairs in san antonio annapolis, maryland, and Charlottesville Virginia opting not to reschedule. The American Library association also announce a cancellation of their annual conference is june in chicago. The Los Angeles Times festival of books, originally set to take place in april was decided to hold their 25th annual festival in october. And north americas largest Publishing IndustryConvention Book expo has also decided to push back there so until july. Five of the largest book have decided not to attend regardless bird bookstores are in the country are looking to provide Remote Services for the customers through online sales and virtual author events using platforms like crowd cast and zoom. Star doors and moved online sales of also cut back on their staffing. Many of the countries publishers have decided to delay the release of many books. Some have laid off staff, and several Book Distribution centers have been temporarily closed. Book tb will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. You can also watch all of our archived programs anytime. At booktv. Org. Smack im very pleased introduce tonights speaker joanne is the winner of the art writing Fellowship Award from she has been a resident and ibm, a Nonfiction Program felt an instructor at the ol