Can we have everyone sit down . Thanks. Thank you. Hi, welcome to the second session of todays symposium. This is titled combating online operations. Im the senior fellow for digital policy at the counsel, and were very lucky to have these experts with us to discuss this issue. We have renee, thomas, and clint. I anticipate a very lively and fascinating conversation. I want to start with thomas. When the Supreme Court and the u. S. Decided on Citizens United back in 2010 it predicated the whole idea that corporations should be able to spend money in elections because the internet, you know, which was then seen as this great engine of transparency and democracy, that the internet was going to bring full transparency to american election. And so that was going to be the magic bullet. And, you know, at the time i was in the obama administration, we were really taken with the idea of internet freedom. But it seems that since then the openness of the internet which we hoped would solve a lot of political problems, undermyna thoritarian government is almost being used to undermine democracy by some authoritarian governments. I wondered if you give us a little history, what it is were missing and what do we need to be mayipaying more attention to. Thank you, id be happy to provide some history. Im writing a book right now. Please stop me if i start to skip into too much detail there. But disinformation or active measures to use the old soviet term of art which emerged in the 60s is of course a very old phenomenon. And if we go look at the cold war we literally have hundreds more likely thousands of examples. Small individual active measures of disInformation Operations. I interviewed a few people who actually worked in active measures for their entire career, as you may be able to hear in my funny accent im german. So i recently interviewed a form former stazi operator. From one of them i got this great line that they thought the best mix between truth and fact, fact and forgering, truth and lie is 8020. 80 true, 20 false because that makes it really hard for journalists or experts like us to actually tell whats true, factual and whats not factual. So lets make an example of a particularly vicious operation from the year 1960 that was revealed in a congressional hearing in the mid1980s. In 1960 the context here is decolonization. And many african countries merely independent wondering if they should join the west or the soviet bloc. And in that context suddenly a pamphlet appeared, a 16page pamphlet appeared in i believe 16 different african countries in french as well as in english. And it contained pictures and text, and it was entitled to our dear friends. And it was on the face of it written by an africanamerican in the United States african many organization to africans in africa explaining to them the true ugly face of American Culture at home. And it was full of racial discrimination, lynchings in the south, Police Violence against africanamericans. Now i checked and went through the press reports at the time and almost every single detail in those 16 pages is completely accurate. Down to the very gruesome details that im not going to repeat here. But this is an example of an active measure that was a real headache for the state department. Very difficult to counter because it was based in truth, facts. But at the same time under a false cover of a nonexistent organization. So it is just one of literally hundreds of examples that i think highlights some methods of operation that we still see today. So clint, youve been talking about how the u. S. Has to respond for quite some time. And we see in some other western democracies there is some response in the operations. Can we talk about what seems to be working, what might be some interesting models . I dont know anythings working yet. There is some progress. Theres the defense and then the sort of countering portion. The europeans get it because theyve been in this game much longer than we have in the United States. Theres a twopart failure in the United States with russian meddling. One, we didnt understand hacks were being used for influence. We were looking at it from investigations. And the second part was this was already going on in places like eastern ukraine, brexit. We didnt think it would happen in the United States. We were arrogant to this, that it would never come to our shores. But they are more in the trenches on this. Theyve been dealing with it for a long time. So the things they did a 50year period is education. We dont invest in it here, but they very much push forward their stances on it. And the other thing theyve done is go ahead and acknowledge when these untruths are being leveraged towards them and in certain cases czech republics they are organizing. For them its a challenge because they have different audiences. If you want to understand russian active measures its about language not necessarily about culture because thats how you communicate in social media. So if you want to track and influence a campaign you just need to look at the languages theyre using and the way theyre narrating all that. Whats interesting with all those countries as opposed to our own is, you know, the basic rule youre taught in boxing which is you dont punch back until youre feet are on the ground. So they understand what they want in their country and what theyre defending, what their policies are and then can move to counter the influence narrative. We have failed in this for a decade now whether its been the terrorists or the russian disinformation in our counter influence because we dont really know if we believe in it and we dont always stand for it. You cant counter back whether its online or on the ground a counter influence campaign unless you know what your nations policies are, believes are and what youre going to push back with. If you look at the cold war, we were prodemocracy. We had nationalism. We had things we were trying to advance around the world. Right now i am not sure that the russian message is different than our own here at home. And so you cant do counter influence or counteractive measures until theres some consensus at home about what we believe in here, what we defend, and what well promote overseas. The narrative we saw rise around the election is antieu, antinato, lets Work Together to kill isis, be a nationalist, not a globalest. You first, the world second. How do we counter that . It sounds pretty familiar. So im just saying in terms of you cannot move forward, the way the europeans are moving forward even in their own countries they have a baseline from which theyre standing in their counter influence campaigns. They know whos in charge. I dont think we have that here. Both structurally and in terms of message theyre just much more grounded. They can punch back. Just to pick up on that, one thing ive heard people talk about it is its just so much easier to be negative. Its much easier to get your message out than if youre in favor of something. What youre saying is theres been some success. People at least have a better ability to articulate what democracy is about. Right, its not just about democracy. Some countries will say its about us first and not our adversary. But they have a clear way of communicating to their publics both from a Leadership Perspective and through their media and Public Affairs where they communicate out to their public very clearly, this is what we stand for, this is what we believe in. So its a positive message. Its not just an antirussian for example. Thats right. And it may be a nationalist. And our biggest challenge right now it has been, i will be coming up on the fouryear mark the first time i talked about this in government audiences. In 2014 the last Government Group i talked to was three or four months ago and i have the same deer in the headlight look when i talk about this stuff. Not because theyre doing anything wrong, there are agencies in the u. S. Government that want to do things. But the way our system works is policy sets requirements, requirements set funding. This is how we move our organizations. And im not sure anyone knows what their role is in countering influence online or who would have the ball. I made specific recommendations. Theyre pretty easy actually. You know, fbi should look at investigations of hacks now for how might this be used for influence later. And thats inoculation strategy. Dhs and state department at home or abroad should defute falsehoods almost immediately. In the Intel Community we have decide what our strategy is in information and influence. No one really knows at least i dont know whos in charge. Its been a year sips this happened now, and i dont see any gears moving at this point. Rene, i want you to take us to the private sector and talk about the private platforms. Theyve been doing a lot, some more than others. But putting in people to review accounts, review posts. Talk to us a little bit about where the incentives for the these platforms are and to the extent of which they have the incentive to cleanup versus the tension between their economic model and cleaning up disinformation. Sure. Theres a i want to first pay ba back on this idea that no ones in charge. Theyre Business Models are based on attention. Theyre selling ads. They want to keep you on their platform because they want to be the one to serve you the ads because thats how they earn revenue. Theres a fundamental Business Case thats underlined why the kind of fundamental challenge is doing things to make you happy on the platform is such a core part of the business. And thats why its so personalized. You see the things that are likely to make you happy and keep you on the platform. And so when that intersects with an influence operation its very carefully tailored. Influence operations have been around for decades. But the vectors of disinformation have changed. The ability to personalize that content has change. The ability to target individuals with exactly whats going to work for them based on the corpus of data that platforms have accrued about each one of us over years and years of use, what did you click on, that tells me something about you. If it doesnt tell me something directly, i have a correlation to someone like you. Anybody running an ad or growing an audience on a platform like facebook is reaching people who are predisposed to be interested in the content. Thats why its such an effective means of delivery. So thats the kind of base framework. So the problem is if this used to be ten years ago now the concept of the filter bubble became popular, the idea that the platforms were showing people what they wanted to see. And that was kind of creating these information silos. When you look at what has to be done to break people out of that or to say these people are more likely to be prediz posed to disinformation content, the platforms are not coming back and telling people who viewed this content that they were targeted. So right now a lot of conversations weve been having are what are the responsibilities of the platforms sphcan we ask them to act against their own economic interest in the interest of society . The way in Information Operation is connected is its not limited to one network. By writing an article, creating whats known as a content forum or blog or anyone can write anything on the internet. This was supposed to be a great advantage because we all had the opportunity to make our voices heard and get information out there. But i can write something on my blog and post it to reddit. I can do this with tons and tons of content and i can see what gets left. I can see the ranking of whats moving up the page. Its being voted on by the readers. Theyre endorsing it. Then i can take the content that plays really well and move it over to facebook. And on facebook i can use an ad campaign to grow an audience. Once i have some audience i achieve whats called organic lift. Thats the idea of rather than having to pay content to somebody each time, my hundreds and thousands of people who have been onto follow my page or who have joined my group, are going to push that content out for me. So facebook has a much larger audience than reddit. What ive done is tested the content on reddit. Theres a number of these kind of platforms where i can see the reaction of the community i want to go for. Then i can move it to facebook where i can begin to have people do the sharing work for me which brings down the cost to run the campaign. At this point i have hundreds and thousands of people disseminating my propaganda for free. Also im going to take it to twitter. And what im going to use twitter for is twitter has a high concentration of media users. Theres a ton of journalists on twitter, millions and millions of followers. Donald trump, for example. 45 million i think. At that point i can kind of cross the rubicon, and if i can make something trend on twitter, retweet my content, retweet my article i can at that point guarantee there will be some Media Coverage of it. The Media Coverage might debunk it, but it doesnt matter even with the active debunking its still keeping it in the public consciousness. We call them hoaxes, but its a very quaint term. Or if the media doesnt cover it, i can start a Conspiracy Theory why the media didnt cover that trending topic. So im going to win either way. So this is the way that somebody interested in conducting a campaign will do it in a Cross Platform strategy. And theres no one really responsible for shutting it down because the platforms, im told they have some kind of back channel information sharing. But we didnt see anything really remarkably effective in 2016. And weve continued to see some interesting hoaxes take place you know with regard to the alabama election right now, ongoing. So thomas, talk to us about this concept of organic and the bots plan. Whats the role of the bots and whats the nature of the problem . Bots are certainly an important problem. But before we talk about some of the more technical aspects of application operations on social media, i think we should take a small step back and speak about the role of the press, the role of journalists for a short moment, i think. Again, historically theres a great line, the head of the stazi Disinformation Forum he was brill i want. He was better at this than kgb, because their main target was west germany. They literally could sometime listen to them, they could make german jokes and west germans would laugh about them. You know, as much as germans joke. [ laughter ] and so they had this idea what would be the active measure without the journalists . So the journalists is an integral part of this operation. We saw that play in 2016 in the election interference in a new way. Lets tease out how it was new. Active measures, i mentioned this particularly bad one from 1960, back in the day were artisinal. You needed to know if youre doing the work, they required craftsmanship from intelligence operators. Today or in 2016 the active measure was very much industrial scale. They hacked a lot of data, put the data in the Public Domain through wikileaks or other fronts. And then it was the journalists of the victim society, the victim country, in this case the United States that actually created the value in terms of the damage done. Because they went in looks for the demes and the nuggets and reported them out and ignored the source. Now every journalist or everybody really who now we think we understand the risks and we wouldnt make the same mistake again, i think we all have to think again. Two weeks ago a little thing happened in germany which is remarkable. Two weeks ago theres people running a story about germanys u. N. Ambassador, the former security advisor. And theyre reporting that hed cept an email to the u. N. Secretarygeneral asking in somewhat in an improper way to create a job for his wife. He probably shouldnt have done that. But that email they dont say where they got the email from. The next day another source tells the newspaper we know that ap 28, and they explicitly identify that as russian intelligence, hacked the systems, found the email, gave it to a speaker journalist and he ran the story for the second time. He had already done that a couple months prior knowing he probably advances the interest of a russian intelligence agency. Ask i think we shouldnt underestimate the competitive the rough competitive nature of journalism in a crisis that is actually created by the social Media Companies. So you have the perfect storm for active measures. Clint, would you pick up on that . And sometimes its the competitive force, sometimes its ignorance, right . Right. And sometimes they feel they have no choice. Something becomes trending, the bots are pushing it, the president has talked about it. What can be done, and if the government if theres a limit to what our government can do, Civil Society in other countries is taking measures to push back. Right. I mean, hes exactly right. Comtitian is one of the motives that makes it super easy to get active measures to work. The other one is fear. If you can scare a population, which the russians and the soviets before them were very smart about doing calamitous messages. You hit them with fear and load up a political message right behind it, theyre more likely to fall for it as well. And you see that with benghazi conspiracies that would be pushed around, some of things we observed in the social media space and people would grab them. Very few in a couple of cases, and their followers can spread it much more quickly. I think there are a few things we need to think about. The internet and anonymity. Everyone comes to the internet or social media with the best of intentions. And the those with the resources, time and worst intentions ultimately take control of it. You can look at criminals and hackers arent they going around the world making us transparent and free . Anybody ever happened what happened to those guys . You know, the big and the powerful ultimately come to learn how these things work. And if you arent under the rule of law, if you dont have to worry about civil lishlts, if you dont have to worry about a free press checking you, youre going to work around the system. I think myanmar is great case system how this has been duplicated in a year. I think were seeing this play out even in elections today. Two things we can do. One is authenticity of authorship. There are ways we can protect their identity. There are ways we can protect anonymity, but there are Public Safety factors. We always say First Amendment doesnt protect the right for you to yell fire in a movie theater. We saw Disinformation Networks pumping conspiracies around, hey, jfk has been evacuated. Maybe its a terrorist attack, maybe someone was shot wheres the truth in that . It never comes back. People believe the first thing they read, its very hard to refute those things. So theres a safety part of it that goes well beyond the Political Part of it. The other thing is how do you deal with social media. Fact checking, that was always going to be a giant waste of time. I can make fake news faster than you can fact check it. To do that you have to go after the outlets that are mostly producing this sort of information. So we had talked about a rating system, kind of like sweeps for television. And it seems like i think google and maybe facebook with some of the Media Companies are now onboard. Theyre going through at least trying to come up with a system to figure out whos doing ad20. Maybe if youre a mainstream outlet, that would hurt you. The yooiidea is improve everyon journalism and reward those doing Good Journalism over time. We were tracking in the 14, 15, and 16 the outlets that would suddenly pop in Eastern Europe and then suddenly pop up and talk about how they should be destroyed in the middle of the night. How do you stop that . Youve got to put some sort of metric or challenge on it. Ultimately it comes down to some Public Education around understanding Information Sources and weve got to put it back on the consumer. Thats why i like the nutritional label idea. It makes the consumer decide dont block the content. If they want to write garbage and someone wants to read gabbage 90 of the time, its fine. Its like youre crazy uncle would send you the crazy emails and you write back uncle, fact check this. People have jumped over and theyve gone from assessing news from their friends to assessing 1,000 inputs a day on social media. This is huge mental leap. We are going to fail. Everybody falls for fake news once in a while. The more real the media, the more youll fall for it. What we saw now is fake media, fake audio coming out. Weve got to inform the public, make decisions on their own so theyre not pointing to social Media Companies, pointing to politics, not pointing to journalists. Theyve got to be responsible for their own information consumption. And thats what the europeans have done over the last 50 years. Theyve been good about educating the public on it. France and germany, part of the reason why, theres lots of structural reasons but they also consume far less news on social media than they do from traditional resources than they do from friends and family. But that will change over the next 10 or 20 years. Youre seeing the Younger Generation moving to this. I think its super important we sort of work on the public, for them taking responsibility for themselves but also help them understand the dangers. We had this with Consumer Reports and bad products in the s 70s and 80s. If you buy the bad chinese import, it could burn your house down. But thats on you. That was your choice to purchase it. So informing the public is something i think is good all around for our country. So on the nutrition labels or the fact checking, some of the ways in which the platforms have asked journalism or others on the outside to find their problems and help them correct that, i keep thinking about your expression affartisinal. That feels artisinal whereas the bad stuff is coming at a much faster and industrial rate. Renee, i just wonder what ways the algorithms be used to fight back . People keep talking about this. How can the algorithms be used not to substitute for Public Education but how to backtrack the more Dangerous Things given the protections . Its challenging because algorithms are written by people. One thing that comes to mind when you ask the question is facebooks recommendation engine. So as i said the recommendation engine as i said earlier is designed to serve you things you want to see so you stay on facebook. So if i like a page, heres a very specific example, if you are prone to conspiracy, thinking actually the greatest predictor in belief in a conspiracy is belief in another conspiracy. If you like a page on chem trails or a page on an antivaccine page, facebooks recommendation begins to serve you things related to that. The other thing we began to see is facebooks recommendation engine recommending pizza gate, the conspiracy that Hillary Clinton ran a vast sex ring under a under ground pizza place. Its taking belief in pseudo science and conspiracies and pushing them down the rabbit hole into anticonspiracies or bizarre its an interesting problem because from a facebook business standpoint its giving the people what they want to see. But this is where we ask the question and one of the conversations happening a lot in the valley right now is whats the kind of ethical design there . Theres a concept called choice architecture. You dont give people who are hungry if you show them the doughnuts first versus salad, theyre going to eat the doughnuts. If you put the salad out there first, theyre more likely to make the choice better for them from a health standpoint. How are we thinking about what weve created and might we make more ethical decisions that dont necessarily impact profit. I think oats not censorship to not suggest some of this content. If someone wants to go to facebook and type in pizza gate and join pizza gate groups, that is facebooks decision to decide what remains on its platform on sharing information of availability. But when you make the decision to serve something up, thats a proactive action by a platform. And this is where things kind of get into a little bit of a area where we could potentially see the platforms make some design decisions that could have potentially quite a powerful impact. Can i tack on a comment there . Yeah, sure. Its a comment on twitter. And i think its a design decision that some people follow the twitter abuse by bots, especially wondered why has twitter not done this . Just an example, make it very concrete. Some of you in the room may remember when twitter had the egg profile picture by default. Usually eggs didnt provide interesting content, so you could opt out of eggs for a while. When you signed up for a new twitter account, you could tick that box saying i dont want people in my feed that still have the egg profile picture. That was possible for a while. Now why is it not possible to opt out of bots . Its possible to aumt out of eggs, so why isnt it possible to opt out of bought traffic . Twitter has claimed they have sophisticated Machine Learning mechanisms in place that can automatically recognize bots. So why dont they give users the opportunity to click, you know, to take out bots and have no more bots traffic . Probably they could then cut down their entire active user base by doing that. The neotion of opt in versus opt out is quite profound. Do you voluntarily opt people in and make them decide not to participate versus making them check the box . In twitter in the blue check marks, i was scrolling through the new settings and they had something that said turn off low quality accounts. And i thought oh, my goodness, this hasnt been available the entire time. So they have a sense of what is low quality account, and blue check marks used to be only available for famous people. Ask theyve given celebrities and famous people the opportunity to not see them for years. Rather than creating this pleasant experience for everyone, thats something that really took years to get to. Maybe people would want to opt out of bought content. Lets open it up to members for questions. I want to remind everyone this is on the record and ask you to wait for the microphones. Speak directly into it. Stand, state your name and affiliation. And i think we have a question right here. Thank you very much. Jill dohearty from the wilson center. I wanted to ask and i dont really care who answers it, but this controversy of having rt and sputen register as foreign agents, the rationality behind that was obviously a law passed in 1938 to protect americans from propaganda by the nazis. And im just wondering whether that type of law really has any relevance today . Because how can you protect people against something that every minute something is coming into their box from one account or another . Is that law obsolete . And whats your opinion on enforcing rtn and sputnik to register as foreign agents . Its great that they did that. It wont affect anything that i see on social media. Most people that have sent me rt, this has happened quite a bit. I mean in 2015 i was receiving russian propaganda from friends who was then arguing with me i didnt know what i was talking about. So i was like okay, im glad in missouri you dont know what rt is. Do you know what rt is . Yeah, its rt. Okay. I mean people dont assess their sources now because you trust your friends and family that send you things more than you trust someone else. So part of rts meth daelg which was very brilliant hey, we cant beam in Satellite Television in every home, but we can put stuff on youtube. And then we can have your producers and reporters share it with like minded people. So by the time it moves along, you dont know where it comes from. They will just say oh, its all propaganda, its your propaganda. Nbc, cnn, fox, its all propaganda krsh which is oh, by the way very much the russian world of information in russia. Its your pr, their pr. So weve lost that sort of bearing about reporting versus opinion and fact versus fiction. That has sort of gone sideways. And i dont think declaring a source now, i think its way too late as propaganda, really helps the public. I dont think theyll know even when they receive it, as long as it appeals to their preferences, theyre going to consume it. Its good we do that just so theres awareness okay this is state sponsored news outlet. And theres many other state sponsored news outlets from around the world. Weve seen this with all authoritarian regimes. But as long as it makes them happy, theyre going to keep feeling their bellies and naulens with whatever you feed them on social media. Now news outlets knows thats the formula. I think we have one back there. Unlike most of the people whai think come from the Foreign Policy or tech communities, we do survey research from campaigns and marketing. Worked in foreign diplomacy a decade ago and now working on these issues. Two questions. The reason why rt looks so good and professional and sper suasive because its not designed in russia. Their content is designed by catchumin new york, so my question is im sorry, ill have to limit you to one question. Okay, ill stick with this question then since i started it. Does it make sense to oblige to American Companies who are assisting to declare temselves foreign agents . Yes, thats a simple answer for me. The reason why russian active measures worked and soviets didnt is three parts. One is analog versus digital. You can just do it a lot faster in the digital space. And i shouldnt say it didnt work. In the analog space they had great successes, too, but it took much longer. And the other part what the russians have figured out before americans is too much information is worse than no information. So theyve taken the envelope and opened it up and saturated it. Theyve gone from well try to control the information to ill bomb you with so much information you dont know whats true or false, which is very brill i want. The other part it works is theres enough economic openness that you could actually run a ground lever along with the virtual. So this is what americans completely miss in all of our we love our social media. We keep talking about social media. They take physical things, real world things, facts, and then they use that or manipulate truths or other falsehoods to push a conpierce. There are physical actors. Just like you mentioned they have physical partners that are also happening them. If were going to be upset about this sort of influence, well have to look at how do we characterize agencies like that, if its starting to break up our democracy . Thats whats really starting to happen now. Were seeing devergence, that i think were closer to seeing real breaks. Then the question will be what are u. S. Companies doing on behalf hof the United States overseas. Its a twoway street. And its a policy situation that i think is going to get super, super complicated. I just want to add a cautionary note. One of the things that makes this country so great and attractive for the rest of the world, lets spell this out for a moment, is the First Amendment and the strength of the First Amendment. So as soon as we start messing with the notion we can declare certain forms of speech because they come from forners in a way that could be hostile, thats not okay anymore. Were crossing a line somewhere. I would just like to call attention to that. And i think one of the lines that has been drawn, though, is on foreign interference in elections. Because thats different from foreign speech. But youre right to draw that. Thats exactly what i wanted to zero in on. Were talking about an attack on the United States. In that context you have to look at repercussions that are about that attack. What ultimately will come out as a counter influence thing, is the u. S. Isnt going to be able to do much of anything. The u. S. Should never repeat what was done to it to another country. I would be very upset it we hacked into thousands of peoples emails and dumped their personal information of any country out on the internet. I dont want to see false journalist stories. Ive seen that nonsense talked about in the news. Planting news stories, discrediting outlets. Ill be very upset in our country if we do it. There are simple things we could go in with russia, but we shouldnt do it back. With that, my answer of yes was we just suffered a major attack, and weve got people in the United States who dont believe theyre vote counted, still. We just heard that in the previous panel. So weve got to come up with some sort of response. Im sorry, weve got to move on. We have a lady in the blue. It appears to me were going to have to be more deliberate in our Education System so that the youth is theyre more critical thinkers. So what would you recommend we do to improve the Public School system . Because i dont believe that its going to be helping this situation. Well, and i can speak to this a little bit. I mean are we going to do Public Education anymore . Im not really sure in this country, right . Were going in some weird directions on Public Education. I went to a Public School, both high school and for college i went to a military then. But we have one thing with a set curriculum. There are ways you can actually water that and weld that down i think for a High School Curriculum that i think would be super valuable. And the European Countries have done this in a lot of ways. I think sweden has done this, helping their people understand without going into political biases and getting crazy about it. It would be hard to implement in the United States because of our state delivery services. Italy just put out a curriculum specifically for this. I dont know the specifics, but it was announced a couple weeks ago. I remember the whole ground around subliminal advertising. Which came out it wasnt such a big threat, but we all were scared about it for a long time. Allen, sydney, austin. The comment on what makes america so attractive to the world, First Amendment, free speech really raises the issue. Maybe instead of focusing on education the public about evaluating information, we should reemphasizing teaching what makes america great. Weve been distracted by conspiracy theories, exaggerated news stories, sooon. What what we dont hear is First Amendment and due process and principles and constitution. But weve moved away from that in teaching civic education. Maybe thats what we need to reemphasize to bring the country back to reasonable i just think its absolutely unreal in 1980 i watched the olechlices against the soviet union. And then in charlottesville theyre chanting russia is our friend. This is political and philosophical discussion to be had. We all probably have the same information that russian bots as well as president s should not be able to delete tweets because its on the Public Record. We also all have the same iteration that 16yearolds who tweet something stupid should not be able to retweet. How do you reconcile it . Thats an interesting question and we should look into it. If the tweet is deleted, you should no longer use it. Which is why ahead of the hearings twitter compiled and released this list of accounts. But by the time it was made available to the public and to the senate perhaps, they had already deleted all the content. So one of the problems we face as researchers is the platforms have a vested interest in not sharing that nfrginformation. Why do russian bots have privacy rights . Because the justification in the right to be forgotten and the 16yearold being able to delete her tweet, its personal privacy. These are fake accounts, manipulative accounts. Its rulickious to think were giving privacy considerations to fake people, but that is the state of the conversation as it stands today. David of the gw project for media and national security. Panelists, clint in particular but all panelists, i guess my question right now on the topic of this panel is can we trust facebook and google and others to get the problem that clearly emerged in the last election under some kind of control . Or i mean at what stage does there need to be regulation of our social Media Companies in order to prevent their platforms from being used to change the results of elections . And i guess i want to add something that i feel like we havent talked about. We dont want do be battling in terms of where the threat is coming from, it may not just be russia. And secondly, the different kinds of tools thatll be used. Rene, do you want to start . What the social media platforms do and what should the government be doing . I think i have a couple different avenues. You have market promotive regulation, which is where users get very angry. Thats something the media often helps push. Or you have selfregulation. Where the companies decide as an industry this is something worth their time. And then theres government, which takes much longer. And i dont think were going to see that happen by 2018, which is of course a source of major concern for people who Pay Attention to this problem. I think that we saw with isis a few years back russia is not the first time that the tech bought firms have had a disinformation and propaganda problem. It took several years to get the Tech Companies to come together on this forum to combat internet terrorism. I think it was about three years from the identification of the problem and something be done to this organization being stood up to do something. So in many ways i think were going to be dependent on media over researchers or people putting out, you know, much like were seeing with had some of the disinformation around the Roy Moore Campaign in alabama, hey, you need to look at this. We need to get the story out there. We need to have twitter responding to researchers rather than attempting to diminish or discredit the work independents are doing right now. Maybe you want to add to that. So bots and abuse is a threat to facebooks Business Model because facebook is ultimately about authentic human accounts. And vultd facebook is trying to tackle the problem and throw money and people and resources at the problem. And i think theyve made some right moves. Getting a luot of bad press for it, but thiefb made the right move. For twitter, bots arent a threat but actually helping the model because they make it appear larger. So from twitter we can expect the opposite. I wouldnt be surprised if some twitter engineers have moved to facebook to fix the other problem. So i think twitter right now deserves a lot more attention than it is getting. Ill put it in very plain english, and ill use an analogy. Imagine the New York Times decides, well, we should give our readers to unpublish letters to the editor from our website. They could do that, right . Fair enough. Thats what twitter is doing. But twitters doing something else. Theyre also saying we should give our readers the ability to unpublish letters from the editor not just from the New York Times but also from the library of congress. And that is just not okay. If we have something from the Public Record from people who have chosen to put something on the Public Record for an affect, not necessarily the 16yearold, then they shouldnt be able to remove the record from a nonpublic, sometimes nonpublic repository. Because the effect is they make history and in fact the news editable. And youre seeing that from foreign actors . Lets make this a little edgier. How many retweets from the real donald trump account he tweets from, how many of the retweets are actually bots versus human beings . The retweets or likes . Answer, and its really an uncomfortable answer. The answer is we dont know and maybe twitter doesnt even know and couldnt even find out because of its policies. Because of the deletions. So thats a policy idea. What other policy ideas . Youve talked about Public Education, nutrition labels. I mean i dont really see in terms of regulation for policy, lets focus just on elections and politics, whatever the standard is for advertising on whatever other media should be the same in social media. I dont know why we treat it differently. That would at least inform the public so they can make better choices about what theyre consuming. They know where an ad is from. And weve seen groups use social media over and over again. They know were emotional, we want to win. Thats a big part of it. I am not going to hold my breath for the social Media Companies to figure it out. And im not going to beat them up either. Theyre there to provide a service, and when bad things happen, i expect them to move forward and make corrections. This is an issue that emerged in 2005, and it only took us 12 short years to get on top of this. With that, both google and facebook have moved deliberately over the years to improve Threat Detection along with technical detection. So there have been times where ive gone to social Media Companies said, hey, here are thousands of disinformation accounts. And they go, yeah, we dont care. A i Machine Learning, theyll figure it all out. Weve got a machine thats so great. Im much smarter than you. You know, look at me on my skateboard and the office and whatever. So that sort of arrogance has gone away in the last ten years or so and become, okay, i need to understand these threats like terrorism and disinformation or whatever and theyve got to pair that with the technologygists. Theyve begun to expand that out. But at the same time they cant cover every issue in the world. Like whos the person on facebook covering myanmar right now. Theyve got to go to people who understand these issues and quickly put Machine Learning and a i and technologists learning with it. For terrorism, we were pairing industry and research and government to come up with solutions. So theyve got to do that a little bit better. But ultimately this problem comes down to leadership. So our country has to decide, and it doesnt have to pea elected leaders. It can be Civil Society. What do we want . What do we want our world to be like . Just imagine in 2020 every Political Campaign adopts the russian play book and uses it on social media. Im not talking about a foreign influence operation. Im talking about every country in the world saying you know what i want to happen in america, the bots, ads, doing it on scale. Now add domestic Political Parties on it. Every candidate running bun one those. Guess who is going to lose. If you think can you run for election as a person whos like schoolteacher or got a 25,000 job a year job and youre going to run for elected office in the United States against a machine, a Political Campaigns and, you know, parties, Political Parties, youre insane. This will quickly become just those that have the resources, those that have the time can manipulate and chip the information the way they want. We talk about russia a lot. Im more worried, this is the world you want to live in where it is a cacophony of noise. I think a lot of americans will walk away. Theyll be apathetic and say i dont want to participate in this. We have for in the back. Thank you. Clint, your idea on labelling. This has been discussed a lot. But my question to you is, this is kind of the big mac theory. If you tell somebody something is bad for them, actually going to change their behavior. Theres no evidence for this thats compelling when it comes to actual nutritional labelling. So people are not eating less big macs because they know there is 2,000 gallericalories in the. People are making the decision thats on the consumer. Thats what i want. This is what i want i can challenge you on this . It doesnt seem the consumer responds to labelling is the point im making. In the nutritional world, there are federal agencies that are regulating not just nutritional content but also products that can have some hazard to human life. Wond we ne wouldnt we need a similar agency . There is a government agency. Threaten why would labelling work whether consumers dont respond to labelling whether it comes to other products. They do. Lets go to amazon. Youre mix ag lot of different analogies together. Lets go to amazon in terms of rating systems. Does anyone buy the one star rated program with two reviews . Generally no. Right . So its a system that comes up over time t will someone buy the product with one star and two reviews . Absolutely. Its 5, right . So someone is going to buy it. Im not trying to win over the whole world. But i want people to have responsibility for the decisions they make about the information that they consume. And so we have told you this outlet puts out 70 false information, 20 manipulated truth, 10 truth. This is where that outlet is based at. Did you know that this is a state sponsored outlet or its an outlet that is based in bulgaria that suddenly popped up six months ago. Are you aware of that . Thats up to you if you still want to read it because you think theyre informed. Give them that information. It will chip away. Look at rotten tomatoes. There is another rating site where this happened. Now actors are complaining if they get bad rotten tomatoes, you know theyre not getting a chance. I understand a little bit. Its not just about putting the nutrition label on it. Its about telling people heres what the source has been putting out reporting versus opinion, fact versus en that is a little bit about that outlet. Now you make your own decision. Thats what i point out. Youre talking about a couple different things. One is more transparency. Do you actually know some context about the source . Obviously, thats important. Otherwise people wouldnt be trying to be what theyre not. When you buy the newspaper, do you know something about the noouch before you pick it up . The reason you get duped by news that is shared with you is because who does it come from . Family and friends and people you trust. You take the trust to the family and friends and social media feeds over the outlets that are out there. Youre not assessing the outlet, youre assessing the story. I want them to assess the outlet. Thats what im seeking. The nutrition labels, it seems like theres some efforts but the platforms to work with the Fact Checkers like snopes and others and thereby get some assessment about whether or not an outlet tends to produce fake disinformation or fake news. There is the new effort, right . This is the effort that is largely unsuccessful. The most recent stories about it. There are a couple components. One thing is platforms like to keep costs down. And the business is to automate things. Any time you have a human component involved and flagging fake news, what you really have brigading and mass reporting wars. You have people deciding i dont like this thing. You have pages calling to action other members. You have to report this story. It says something unfavorable. So it turns into this massive nightmare of, you know, one army of opinions versus another. There is not really hasnt been written about as widely. Amazon, the battle for reviews is actual clinld of the new seo. Amazon shapes consumption. Amazon and the search bar what is seo . Search engine operations. Tricks can you do to make your facebook rate first. We see it all over amazon. If i type in blender, ill pick something from the first page of amazon. And so doing everything i can to get my blender, you know, to that first page of results is poe potentially millions of dollars of revenue or not. So amazon has a very serious manipulation problem. But also relying on 1, 2, 3 innings to identify instances of brigading where people say okay, im going to send an email out to my mailing list asking everyone to do a five star review on the blender. This is where if there is a crowd source element of it, it is being manipulated. And its very interesting. We all thought the crowd sourcing was going to be this magical way where people would participate and we would take the wisdom of the crowd and we would return that into really surfacing the best content, the best products, the things you really needed to see. And its this is the problem withal ga richls. It is manufacturing consensus. Its gathering critical masses of people together in a manipulative way that shapes creates a false notion of how popular something is whether thats a product or story or a person. A lot of the accounts and fake accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. They look legitimate. People dont dig in. The platforms have to take it on themselves to say were going to have an opinion. Were going to hire internal people and we cannot relegate this task to crowd sourcing. By the way, i dont want it to be crowd sourced. One of the rules is we have to end on time. I want to make sure we honor. That i think we flushed out a lot of the challenges here. Hopefully well continue the conversation about how to move forward. We obviously have to come up with solutions. Thank you all very, very much. Many