Transcripts For CSPAN Panelists Discuss The Future Of The Internet 20170820

Hi everyone, thanks for coming. This session we will break into three parts. In each part we will tackle this question, can democracy survive the internet . We are going to talk about trolls and hackers, leakers, twitter, facebook, filter bubbles. Fundamentally this question is whether a democracy in which media and organization is moved online, whether we can survive or adjust to that new world. A will start with nate, professor of law at stanford law school. His scholarship focuses on Voting Rights, political parties, Campaign Finance, redistricting, and elections administration. He served as special master for expert to craft districting plans for many straight and senior director for the Election Administration and his current work examines changing technology on political communications, campaigns, and Election Administration. Broadly that is what he will be talking about here today. With that, lets welcome nathan. [applause] thank you so much. It is an honor to be here. And it is an honor to be on this panel. We have a lot of people following me. My role is to set the table and they are going to break the china. I will talk about the issues and they will dive deeply into it. Obviously,ig topic dealing with the question of how the internet affects democracy. I want to focus on three questions. Want to focus on three questions. The first is what are the unique challenges that the internet poses for democracy, ok. And second, given those challenges who should address those problems. And then finally, what would those reforms look like. But i want to start with a few caveats which, there are several pointyheaded academics like me in the audience and i always get these objections, whenever i talk about democracy and the internet, which is that weve all seen this before, thats the first academic disagreement. And the answer is yes. Some of these problems weve seen many times before, whether its fake news, or hate speech or even foreign intervention in domestic elections. Yes, weve seen it many times before. But the question i want to focus on i think the panels focusing on. What are the unique features of the internet that either are differences in kind or such differences in degree that we really need to focus on the technology. The second academic objection is that what you think is so bad is actually pretty good. And look, the internet is a Technology Like any other, right. There are going to be bad things for democracy that occur because of the internet, there are going to good things. And ill talk a little bit about how there has sort of been a sea change in the way weve thought about this in the last year particularly because of the election. And then the third academic argument, well, ive published on that before. But let me talk a little bit about how i got into this area because as farhad mentioned i am a campaign and Voting Rights specialist dealing with Election Administration, redistricting and then Campaign Finance. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Citizens United versus fec, which is maybe the most reviled decision of the Roberts Court or really the Supreme Court in the last 20 years. Most people looked at it as this sort of, you know, great crime that the Supreme Court had committed on the nation as giving corporations personal rights, right. That corporations are people, too. I looked at that case and i said you know thats not what this case really is about. Its really about the transforming nature of the internet for communication and heres why. That case was not about a corporate Television Ad that was sort of washing over captive eyeballs as they were watching the super bowl or Something Like that. What it was about was an ondemand movie that you could download off of say Something Like hbo on demand, right. And it was produced by a Nonprofit Corporation called, as you know, Citizens United. And it really presaged the future of political communication, when we are no longer going to be receiving most of our information and communication through linear programming over the television but through a range of devices and in particular over the internet, you know, mobile phones and the like. And so that was my entry point in thinking about it. And so the question that i wanted to to ask in an article thats titled the same thing as this panel, is what were the unique features that the internet sort of that the internet posed for american democracy. And prior to the 2016 election heres what i thought this book was going to be about, right. It would be about what everybody sort of looked at as Digital Campaign geniuses, right of the obama 2008 campaign or 2012 campaign. Maybe it would be about the revolution in Small Donor Fund raising and and micro targeting another theme that we saw in those previous elections. Maybe it would be about again the change in television as the main mode of political communication. But as you know now when we talk about the affect of the internet on democracy were not talking about these issues, right. What were talking about are things like fake news, right. Were talking about twitter bots sort of automated programs that send information over the internet to social media users. Were talking about foreign hacking, right and dark posts on the internet, right. And so all of the sort of euphoria in some ways about the effective of the internet on democracy has been replaced by this extreme pessimism since the 2016 election about how its going to threaten democracy. And so heres what i think are the sort of six features of the internet that make it different than the previous communication ecosystem in terms of how it affects democracy. The speed of communication, right, we get information more quickly than we did previously. The fact that virality, right peertopeer sharing has become the main way that we get Information Online or a lot of us get Information Online. Third, what weve had anonymous speech before the capacity of an anonymous speaker to reach a worldwide audience is unprecedented when it comes to the internet. Forth and here is, you know, the echo chambers and filter bubbles. The idea that we are selfselecting into our own information that is sort of preselected for us by the platforms and the like. The issue of sovereignty of course came up in this election and or the lack thereof, which is that for the first time it would seem that you know the United States election was in some ways penetrated by a foreign power. And then finally, the new problems created by the extreme power that corporations like facebook and google and maybe others have when it comes to political communication. So let me start with just talking about veracity and virality together. And so, you probably heard this quote a lot, you can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on, right. Attributed to mark twain in 1919, at least if you look on the internet, its attributed to him. Of course he he died in 1910. So its one of many examples of fake news that you could but the point still remains, right which is that that especially in the internet age, there is the capacity of lies in any communication to reach around the world and back again before it could be corrected, before it can be mediated, before it can be assessed for its veracity. Now why is it that this happens . So, the big story, right in terms of the speed of communication is that we can do it individually, right, so that each one of us can essentially be a broadcaster, whereas previously, you had, you know the sort of, elite broadcasting companies, you had the newspapers, whether the local or the national level, who could act as mediators that would stop certain types of information or at least would put in road blocks for a certain types of speech and information from getting to the mass public. Now that had positive and negative consequences, right. So that when Walter Cronkite said thats just the way it is, americans believed him right, and there was a kind of neutral source for information that people could count on. Of that excluded certain voices from the left and the right, right. But now what we have is a media ecosystem in which republicans are trusting certain sources, democrats are trusting different sources, and there is little trust in the media as an institution at all. Now that lack of trust in the media, right, is 8 representative of a larger lack of trust that americans now have in almost all elite institutions, right. And i should say its not just in america, its happening around the world. So this lack of intermediaries right, this sort of, elite intermediaries that put a sort of squelch speech, or set the ground rules for what could sort of be transferred from political actors to the mass public is what makes the problem of fake news possible. And that everybody who talks about fake news hates the moniker fake news and you can count me as one as well, right because fake news is not really news, its also describing a very heterogeneous set of phenomena. On the one hand you have you know, the daily show or the onion satire which is of course fake news and that was actually the first time we talked about fake news that was the phenomenon were referring to. It also refers to things like, i have on the top here, fake news for profit something we did see in this election really at a scale that we hadnt seen before. So youre probably familiar with 150 macedonian teenagers, right who put out these particular articles such as the pope endorses donald trump. And why is it that they put up these pro trump websites . Well, it wasnt that they actually had some affinity for donald trump it was that because of the way google and other Services Provided ads on to those sites they could make money by putting up something that then would get a lot of clicks. And so the fake news for profit issue and topic came up. But then beyond the that sort of relatively small problem of people who are putting up websites in order to make money off of the ads. You also have as weve heard in this sort of in the most violent consequence of fake news Something Like the pizzagate scandal, right where someone sort of believing the conspiracy theories that were sort of stirred in the cauldron of reddit and 4chan these websites then actually took action by going to a pizza shop and firing a gun. And so all of this again is a product of the fact that you dont have the traditional intermediaries and that it is a more populist right and popular form of communication. Now, if you look at the data on fake news you do find as buzzfeed, buzzfeed is done by the way some incredible journalism on this and others have shown, as well as academics who kept playing catch up. A remarkable amount of sharing of fake news right, and the Pew Research Center and lee rainie can talk a little bit about this afterwards, finds that america about 23 of americans say that they have shared a fake news story, right. And if you look at the tweets or the engagement on facebook, which i have up here you find significant sharing of fake news during the election. We do not know however what effect fake news had on this election. My colleague mat gentzkow at stanford actually says he doesnt think it played a dispositive role. But the problem here is how do you define fake news. How do you get your arms around all the different types of falsehoods that are out there on the internet, right. But what but we can say is that the media ecosystem has changed as a result of it that there are certain incentives that werent there in the pre internet world and that we have, sort of, a lot of this content out on the internet. One of the reasons is because of the ability to engage in anonymous speech online. Now look, we have a long tradition of anonymous speech something we should be proud of, right. The federalist papers, publius, you go go throughout the sort of anonymous pamphleteers of the founding era or later. Now, anonymity is something thats actually sometimes protected under the constitution. But it is also in the internet age facilitates, get this, misinformation, the problem of foreign intervention, it aides in the propagation of hate speech and then the issue of bots, which i was referring to before that that computers can essentially imitate human beings. Now let start in talking about the issue of bots. So just to be clear what a bot is . Its it sounds fancy but its not, its basically just code in the 10 computer right, or in an algorithm in a Search Engine that produces, you know a response or or delivers communication to you. Bots can be good, bots can be bad. You can have a bot that tells you what weather it is every day, right. Its just a computer code that gives delivers information. When we talk about the kinds of bots that affect campaigns and affect elections though we are often talking about in particular twitter although its really interesting that there are now bots on youtube and there are bots on facebook that theyve been pretty aggressive in trying to police them. But these bots are automated accounts that pose as individuals, in a sense, or they seem like there might be individuals, who retweet content, produce content sometimes the bots are sort of sent in to comment on other peoples posts but it creates a false impression of popularity. So Something Like one third of the followers that donald trump had on his twitter account during the campaign were bots. And but Hillary Clinton had them as well, right millions of bots were followers of Hillary Clinton. Interestingly enough donald trump retweeted bots by theres some debates about this 100 to 150 times during the election. But thats because you dont know who a bot is, right to sort of the average observer. Analysts, the reason we know these sort of statistics on how how many bots are out there is because if you figure someone is tweeting, some account is tweeting 24 hours a day 7 days a week you think well maybe its not human, right. And so there are ways of trying to figure out whos a bot and whats and whats a bot and whats not. But its a significant amount of the twitter accounts, twitter says its 8 , some analysts say its closer to between 10 and 15 certainly during the debates in right around the president ial debates about 15 of the election related conversation was being done by these automated accounts. About 45 of the twitter accounts in russia are bots, ok. And so its a significant issue going forward. Just as anonymity allows computers to impersonate individuals, it allows individuals to engage in unaccountable speech like hate speech, right. There is a big debate as to whether hate speech actually has been going on, going up over the last year or so. The best analysis is done by josh tucker at nyu and i present one of his slides here, where he finds that actually during the election, there was not an increase or a spike during the in the run up to the election, during the campaign that there wasnt a spike in hate speech. There was a rise in White Nationalist speech it seems following the election, ok. Right and a blip also in masochinist speech, right, after the election. But that part this research is still ongoing and that theres no question that theres been a rise in hate speech directed toward journalists, many of whom are here, right now at this conference and hate speech on basis of race and gender and and religion and the like. And that there are sort of cesspools of hate speech on the internet in places like 4chan and reddit and the like that produce something, you know, things like the pizzagate scandal. Now just as there are these cauldrons of hate speech online theyre cauldrons of everything online, right that there are locations where you can go to get reaffirming information that satisfies your preexisting biases. Whether its cat videos, right or whether its White Nationalist rhetoric, whether its supporting a political candidate or the like. When people talk about the problem of echo chambers, most of the time what theyre talking about is how Search Engines and social media reinforce your political beliefs by feeding you information that is preselected for you, right. And there is evidence that look it is no surprise to you that websites like the drudge report and fox news tend to be more republicans that go to those sites right. That democrats are going to be more likely to go as it shows here huffington post, New York Times and the like, right. Interestingly and this this is from my colleague Shanto Iyengar at stanford. The only the two publications that fall right in the middle are real clear politics and usa today at least during the during the election. Thats because everyone is real clear politics is for the polls, right. And so and so thats why that was sort of fell at right in the middle. And so the challenge in thinking about whether the internet is reinforcing our preexisting beliefs, its not a its not enough to just say well look conservatives gravitate to conservative sites, liberals gravitate to more liberal sites. The question is as compared to what, right. Because we are self segregating in all of our areas of life, whether its online or offline, right. And so you are actually more likely, or at least as likely to run into someone on social media saying your Friendship Network on facebook who voted for a different president ial candidate than you, than you are say if you wanted to find a republican on the streets of aspen right now, right, were only about 20 to 24 of the population here voted for donald trump, right. And thats so much of our lives right are self segregated in neighborhoods, where its reinforcing our political beliefs in the offline world that we see that, the fact that we see that on the online world should not be too surprising. Nevertheless, when you start looking at hot topics or politics and the like that you do see Twitter Networks which are, were democrats are retweeting democrats, republicans are retweeting republicans and people are of course gravitating to many of the sites that that i showed you on the first slide, all right. Now moving to the last two unique features of the internet sovereignty or lack of sovereignty and monopoly. And well have im going to just briefly talk about this because weve got some real experts on the Panel Following me talking about this. In thinking about the issue of russian penetration in the last election, which you know you just need to turn on the tv youll hear about it every day. All of these other features of the internet that ive talked about up till now are ones that are facilitating the ability of outofstate actors, right to have an influence on our domestic elections. That is, i think, one of the unique features of the internet age, right. Yes, its true that the United States and you look at what the United States did in latin america that there are examples where we have had an effect on domestic elections. And there are examples of attempts that russians, you know, even during the soviet era may have tried to have an effect in the u. S. Domestic election. But the sophistication of the Russian Disinformation Campaign with the use of what are, you know, trolls, bots, cyborgs what those you know what bots are now, trolls are actual human beings, if youve been watching homeland, they have a lot of they did a whole episode dealing with trolls or cyborgs which are sort of actual human beings who are in charge of a range of automated accounts through hacking and disinformation and the dissemination of propaganda and the like, through both official and unofficial channels, right. So that whether its through the Rt Television network or through the rt and sputnik web channels you know websites that we saw a lot of this effort in this last election. Finally, let me talk about the issue of monopoly. So i had to get the atlantic in here right. So, which had an article that facebook is eating the internet. Not to be undone, the columbian journalism review says facebook is eating the world. Or as another publication said that google is the new mind control and that you need to have google and facebook stop google and facebook from destroying journalism. And so there is no doubt that the power that these platforms have is different in character from the one from the power that say the three networks had. Because if you look at the affect that theyre having on the Revenue Sources for for journalists its a its a completely different world than one where you had this 14 sort of oligopoly of the broadcast networks and the like. Its a different kind of monopoly though, right its a different type of power and where theres going to a whole session here at aspen later today about whether google and facebook are too powerful. So i commend that to you. But we have this sort of bizarre situation, right, where you have this concentrated power among the platforms and you have this fragmented media environment at the same time. So you have more information at your disposal, information and disinformation, than weve ever had before and yet the power of any individual platform, you know, is diminished except for just a select few like google and facebook. All right. So now let me conclude with just talking about what the sources of reform are. First, you can look to government regulation and thats whats happening in germany, right. So there is a law thats been proposed to stop, its called the fake news bill but its really not about fake news, its about any illegal speech that that is prohibited under german law, which includes things like Holocaust Denial but also a kind of capacious definition of slander and the like. How that that will then be illegal online but more importantly that the platforms will be liable up to 50 Million Euros for any example of illegal speech that occurs on their platform that isnt taken down within 24 or 48 hours. Then there are the platform self regulations. So youve probably seen, if you have a facebook account, this new option postelection to report a story is fake. And so you the user are now empowered to then send a message to facebook that a story should be referred to Fact Checkers, if two Fact Checkers then agree that it is false, then it will be marked as false for every other user. Thats what it looks like when they when you get a disputed fact check. And then finally there are series of apps that have been developed to help all of us combat each one of these problems, whether its echo chambers, or whether its fake news, or whether its automated accounts or not to then give you the user some 15 options that the platforms might not give you. But in each one of these cases the reforms fall into one of several categories. Either as in the fake news situation theres additional disclosure as to what where this is coming from or whos behind it or whether its been checked as fake news. In some cases, its demotion in a Search Engine and a like so for example google news algorithm will tag certain stories or certain sources as less credible than others so that they are not put at the top of a news feed. Theres another proposal for delaying fake news that Krishna Bharat who founded google news has proposed, which is to say, have some trip wires when a story starts becoming viral and gets forwarded more than a thousand times and the like. In europe and elsewhere where you have robust public broadcasting corporations and presence then theres the idea of trying to dilute the effect of bad speech with better speech, right, so that you can combat fake news, hate speech and the like. And then there are more authoritarian approaches to this, although we do this also in the United States, which is to literally censor the speech, right. There, if you look at the platforms and the terms of service that they have, it is clearly the case, right, that whether its incitement or hate speech or obscenity or a range of other types of speech that if you violate those terms of service that that speech will be taken off the platform, right. So i will end just by saying by issuing sort of the challenges that i think the internet poses for democracy that it does test our inclination, particularly in the United States, that the marketplace of ideas is the test for truth. It challenges our democracy to function in an environment where there is widespread disagreement on facts and distrust in institutions. And then finally, how do we manage a Campaign Information ecosystem, when it is sort of, invaded either by humans on the outside, state actors, or bots, trolls and cyborgs on the inside. And so if the question is, can democracy survive 16 the internet, i have a, you know, a click bait answer which is the answer may surprise you. So i will end on that. [applause] mr. Manjoo so while were setting up the chairs for the second panel, let me describe it and ill call up the panelists. So, in part two, were going to be talking about where nate left off, which is information based attacks. And let me introduce the panelists, who are going to be talking with us. One second. So john carlin is the chair of the Aspen Institute Cyber Security and technology program. You can come up. Until the fall of 2016, he was assistant attorney general for National Security at the Justice Department and its top National Security attorney. And he previously served as National Coordinator of doj as hack computer hacking and intellectual Property Program as an assistant u. S. Attorney for the district of columbia and as chief of staff to former fbi director robert muller. Mr. Carlin so, he was in the news again. Mr. Manjoo yeah. Ron brownstein is editorial director for Strategic Partnerships at Atlantic Media, where he contributes to the atlantic and the National Journal including a weekly column on both sites. Hes a longtime political analyst for cnn and he was previously a columnist and Political Correspondent for the la times and hes the author six books most recently the second civil war how extreme partisanship has paralyzed washington and polarized america. And also julia angwin is a Senior Reporter at pro publica where in 2016 she led a Team Investigating algorithms that was a finalist for appeal and surprise in explanatory reporting. And from 2000 to 2013, she reported at the wall street journal where her team of reporters won the 2003 explanatory reporting covering corporate corruption. And shes the author of among other things dragnet nation a quest for Privacy Security and freedom in a world of relentless surveillance. So i wanted to talk about this question of one way to think of what happened in 2016 is to in the 2016 election is to think that it was an attack on the media, like the Media Information system made out like the the way the media works now, as nate defined it, made us uniquely vulnerable to outside attackers. Do you guys think about it that way . Is this sort of a media problem that the collect like journalists and platforms involved in media, like facebook and twitter and others, should work to solve . Mr. Carlin i guess removing it for a second from from the question of our elections, this type of tactic, this type of strategy, its not the first time we saw it. A couple of points. One, the Islamic State in the levant, the growth of a terrorist group who works by crowd sourcing terrorism was adopted a strategy just like al qaeda used aviation against us, western technology against us. We saw Islamic State in the levant try to turn human beings into weapons. And they did so by using social media, which they had for free. And they were incredibly effective at using propaganda and other means to target particularly young people and those with mental issues. In the United States, when i was overseeing the terrorism prosecutions here, we brought more International Terrorism cases than wed ever brought before and they were directly linked to the fact, if you looked at who they were, its not that theres one geographically isolated or ethnically isolated group inside the United States, there are cases across 35 different u. S. Attorneys offices. What they had in common was in over half the cases the defendants were 25 or younger. And most troubling and why prosecution isnt solving the problem, onethird of the cases the defendants were 21 or younger. The reason why is, in almost every case what we saw was the involvement of social media. And secondly, if you look at the use of socalled fake news, we saw the Syrian Electronic Army spoof a terrorist attack on the white house by taking over the twitter, its twitter account and saying that it was under attack. That caused the stock market to lose billions of dollars. Thats fake news and it was reported upon by Mainstream Media once they saw the fake twitter account. Or sony, war game for years what it would look like if north korea attacked the United States through cyber means. We got it all wrong. We never guessed itd be about a movie about a bunch of pot smokers. Its the only time in my career ive had to brief the president in the situation room and started by giving a plot synopsis of that movie, which if youve seen is not easy to do, right. But that attack was not actually the first destructive attack in the u. S. , there had been an iranian affiliated attack on sands casino. There been iranian affiliated actors that committed a denial of Service Attack using a botnet on the financial sector. The reason why everyone remembers sony and north korea, its not because of the destruction, and they did destroy their systems, its not because they stole intellectual property, although they did steal intellectual property and post it, its because they took salacious emails off the system, put them up through social media and then watched as the Mainstream Media jumped all over it and magnified that message out doing the exact harm that north korea wanted to accomplish, which ironically was to prevent the exercise of the First Amendment and political free speech. So, prior to the election, and in different contexts, i think weve seen all these tools used before. Mr. Brownstein yeah. No, and i remember saying at the time and thinking at the time when the north korea episode happened, i live in los angeles now, i mean the initial reaction was, wow, this is really cool. We know what all these people think about angelina jolie. And then it only was later that we kind of realized, you know, this is not so cool, we are being attacked by a foreign intelligence service. And that was exactly the life cycle of the dnc hack and the john podesta hack. And, you know, thats why i think thinking about this as an attack on the media is kind of insufficient. I think what the public is concerned about is bigger and it goes beyond its bigger in two senses. First, were not i think obviously we are worried and with good reason after this election about what foreign actors can do to us and do to our elections. Whether or not, you know, russia was able to actually influence the vote totals or deregister people, which is kind of a nightmare scenario thats still out there, the sheer level of interfering and throwing dust up is significant and in many ways has succeeded, i think, beyond their wildest dreams in leaving us all kind of chasing our tail after the election. But i dont think were only concerned about what others are doing to us. Its what were doing to each other and the slide, you know, nates slide about, when you look at the level of self segregation on the internet and its really not that different than our self segregation in the Society Overall at this point, just making it easier, more intense, angrier, louder. Just a quick question on this quick question. How many of you live in a county that you think was close in the last president ial election . There you go. 60 of us live in counties that were decided by 20 points or more. So were taking that life, transforming online and adding a level of ferocity because of the anonymity and so forth. So we have like you know, i kind of look at this, i feel like, you know, the title was can the internet survive democracy. No. What do we do for the next hour . You know, what are going o talk about because not that its creating i mean the foreign intervention is giving a new that is new, its giving them a new way 20 to kind of strike at us. But in terms of what were doing to each other, its taking the things that are already happening and it is just accelerating them and making them more vicious, just more vicious in a way that causes, i think, the bonds of the country. Theres no way to look at whats happening in the last few years, especially since this election, without concluding that the bonds that are holding the country together are fraying and that in many ways this feels to me, as someone who travels a lot, spends a lot of time in different cities, this feels to me as barely one country anymore. And the internet i think is an important part of that. Ms. Angwin well, i wanted to say that all that is true, but i do think youre right that the media itself has been attacked but its in a different way than what you guys describe. So i see it through the lens of finances. So if you think about we had this really wonderful period, where having a robust media that was extremely adversarial to the government and really proved to be a great watchdog was also something that was for profit and made money. And that is just no longer true. And ill tell you why its true as i say because weve allowed ourselves to create this new internet economy, which i call the surveillance economy, which is essentially previously with the wall street journal, where i worked could sell their audience, like theyre an elite audience and you would buy pay a lot of money to put ad on their page and their newspaper because those are the high end people you want to reach. But with the internet, we have this new model ad tracking, which is like you dont need to find that guy in the wall street journal anymore. You just say i want to find all dudes who look like john carlin and follow them around the internet with all the tracking technology. And actually theyre more likely to look at my ad, when theyre not reading a really good story. So theyre more likely to look at it on some crappy web site. And so what weve done is made it so that no newspaper can financially support their journalism through their online audience. Not the two leading media outlets, they are in the top 100 properties globally that are New York Times and espn, and neither one of them is profitable online. And so if you cant be a top 100 online property and make money, like, i dont know who can. So then you have another thing, which is nobody would have ever bought an ad in breitbart before, ok, or daily stormer or any of these other places. But they all have ads from Google Ad Networks. And so what weve done is weve taken away the funding for traditional media which had a real sense of a purpose and a watchdog and a mission and weve funded sites that are basically just click bait propaganda on both sides. But there is probably maybe more on one side, i dont know seems that way. And so we do have a financial problem, which is do we want to how are we going to support journalism because journalism is the watchdog of democracy. Right now, if there were no leaks in washington, all those people would be very happy to pretend like theres nothing going on, right. Theres no health care bill. Like, what do you need to know, right. And so this is what journalists are for. And so we do have to face the fact that if you dont fund journalism, it isnt going to be a watchdog for democracy and then we wont have democracy. Mr. Manjoo so lets say we had a better funded mechanism for creating media. What would that like, what would a reformed media have done with Something Like the podesta email . So he gets he gets his phishing attack, he clicks on it. He all his emails get out there. How does a sort of responsible news environment thats competitive like, you know, address that . Ms. Angwin thats a very difficult question because, right, you know you have the european standard 22 is actually very procensorship. And its something i dont think that we would take well to here, right, the whole news blackout in france before the election. Like, it actually worked well for them, right. The wikileaks thing just died. But at the same time, like, me as a journalist, that makes my skin crawl, like, you have like not writing about something. And so i dont know that we as a nation are ready to go to that level. But, you know, its also worth noting that they have kept their democracies intact and maybe thats the price you have to pay. Mr. Brownstein you know, it may be the answer. I mean, i felt like from the beginning with the Podesta Emails that the bigger story was how they were getting out, how this had come to happen than it was anything in them. Theres no way, to your point, that were not going to cover, i think, i mean what is put out. But i think the i would hope after the north korea episode and certainly after the 2016 episode that the question of who did this and why is at least as prominent right from the beginning. Because realistically, as you say, in a and there are no gatekeepers anymore, there are no standards, somebody is going to put it out there, whats in the email. But the message i think should have been, and at least i can say in my own reporting, from the beginning it was how is this happening, why is this happening, who is this doing it, who is doing this has to be equal, i think, equal mr. Carlin i think thats an important issue and as the nonmedia as the nonmedia member, other ways we should start thinking about. This is going to happen again. Weve had every measure leader of our Intelligence Community say the russians consider this a success. They did it before to other countries. Theyve done it here. It was a success. They will do it again in 2020. Maybe as soon as 2018. And france, it wasnt just a one thing that happened in france. So lets assume theres nothing you can do if your system is connected to the internet to keep a dedicated bad guy, particularly a nation state, from getting into your system and looking around. One low cost change of thinking that weve talked about in the corporate sector for a while now is, hey, if you assume thats the case, dont put everything that could harm you the most in a folder called crown jewels and put that inside your system, right. Maybe put something in crown jewels that wont work if they steal it. Well the Macron Campaign did that. So they essentially knew russia was going to break into their system. They deliberately put fake email into the system. When it was then stolen and they attempted to leak, they told the Mainstream Media and others were not going to tell you whats real or whats fake and russia doesnt know whats real or whats fake. Suddenly people didnt want to touch the story. Another issue though on the on the truth is whos the credible voice, which is very hard when youre reading up to leading up to an election, which political leader is going to get up and say, hey, theres a foreign power thats interfering with our election even though all of us in Law Enforcement Intelligence Community can see whats happening. I think there we should think about a structural reform of having a body, a dead man switch if you will, of career officials who can make the determination this is happening and they have no mr. Manjoo why couldnt it have been like the fbi director . Mr. Carlin well, i think weve seen that an fbi director on their own without preconversation is not 24 necessarily sufficient for people to believe the statements that are said. But i think it is an issue, you know, he was struggling with. Youve seen from reporting now the president , others were struggling with how do we call out what were seeing. I think if we want to rely on bipartisan political agreement, that is a thats another thin reed. Mr. Brownstein theres a real bit though theres a little bit though we have met the enemy and he has us here in that in that every Intelligence Agency in october said this was happening. And there was a large segment of the electorate that did not want to believe it either because they didnt trust the Intelligence Community of barack obama or simply because they viewed it as against their interest in the campaign. Thats why theres going to be a problem. And i dont think the internet by any means has created the intense separation, sorting out, polarization that were living through. But it does intensify it. And i do wonder even if we create this bipartisan group, the side that is being advantaged by the leak in the run up to the 2020 election will be is the elite, is the establishment. Ms. Angwin i think though i just like to point out that, like, as far as i understand political campaigning as a tech journalist is, its always been Information Warfare. Like, i dont know what were talking about, to be honest. Like, Information Warfare is what political campaigning is and obviously both sides are going to play the game best they can. The rules of the game have changed and the stakes have gotten crazy with like bulk leaking. But im not sure thats going to change. What disturbs me about this election actually is the nonauditability of our Voting Machines across the nation. We have no way to know what happened. And we also have no way to know what happened on our social networking platform. So as nate was saying, basically the fact is that theres no record of whether fake news made a difference because facebook is the only person who knows, 25 right. And so we need to sort of think im sort of more of the mindset of we need to know how to audit, right. Because i think thats our thats how our democracy works. We are not into censorship. Were not into proactive preventing of information. But we need to function as a democracy to audit it. Mr. Brownstein you would think one thing that is different is that the kind of the moving so much of the communication online has created more opportunities than in the past for these foreign actors to i mean in the 1968 campaign, its not as clear to me how you would have tried to disseminate information, say, across the nation. Ms. Angwin i mean the u. S. Has dropped leaflets in seven countries. Its not like weve never done this before. Mr. Brownstein yeah, sure, right. But no ones dropped leaflets here, i mean. Ms. Angwin oh, cool, but like mr. Manjoo no, but i also think theres a theres an argument that this was more effective than leaflets, right. Like the idea of mr. Brownstein because it leaves no fingerprints. Ms. Angwin yeah. Mr. Manjoo right. And the idea of sort of hacking internal, you know, Campaign Documents that you know would be amplified in the media seems different to me. Like, sort of fundamentally different. Ms. Angwin but its not preventable. I mean i do think what john is saying is like its not like, at this moment, you know, maybe you have some secret thing but i dont know an institution hasnt been hacked, right, the nsa or mr. Manjoo yeah. I mean is that so is the long Term Solution to this i mean, the institutions could get better security. I mean john podesta didnt have twofactor authentication on. Like, he could have just done something simple. Ms. Angwin i mean, i think that the true thing is, and then you would probably disagree with me, but the u. S. Has clearly spent a lot more time preparing for like the equivalent of cyber war at a high level and this was a guerrilla warfare, right. And so we i think theres an adjustment in cyber techniques that its going to have to happen, right, because people need to focus a lot more on the low hanging fruit and maybe, you know, we dont necessarily need to do as many of the high level things or we need to do them too, i dont know. But i think there is an adjustment we have to have. Mr. Carlin well, theres been a wide scale look, weve moved as a society over a 25, 30 year period from putting everything we value in analog space paper and books to digital space. Then we connected it using a protocol that was never designed for security in the first place, the internet. And now were playing a frantic game of catch up, both in the private sector and the government. And the fact is right now today there is no safe internet connected system. So i dont think you can blame the victim in each one of these instances, which we need to balance trying to have them have better security 27 practices so that the low hanging fruit, the actors without sophisticated capability, arent running rampant through our private systems. But at the same time we have to be realistic, we have to start preparing our defenses with the assumption that somebody can get in and not just steal information, alter the integrity of data or destroy the ability of systems to work as theyre as theyre designed. Mr. Brownstein and that is the nightmare scenario, right, that the actual vote totals. You have an election just think about how polarized we are, how divided we are, how apocalyptic each side views the stakes in the next election. And if we have an election where the day after the election we are not sure who really won. Ms. Angwin we just had that. I mean we just had that. Mr. Brownstein well, i dont think i dont think we i dont think we had. I dont know. Ms. Angwin no, we had mr. Brownstein we did not have significant amount of people who said that the vote totals were manipulated. Ms. Angwin no, but we dont know. We dont know. We literally know that they broke in and they tried to get this software from a voting machine the software company. And theres basically no way to audit whether that went any further, right. And we suspect it didnt. But because of the lack of audit trail, like, we are in that situation now. Mr. Manjoo if it did happen, it would look exactly like what it looks ms. Angwin yeah, right, it would look like this. This would be the successful operation. Mr. Brownstein but all im saying is there was not there was not a widespread sense in the country in the day after the election that the results were illegitimate. Ms. Angwin not the day after. It took a while. Mr. Brownstein no, i still i dont think there is now. I mean people i dont think there is now a sense that the results were manipulated. Maybe they should be, but there isnt. And im saying if you get to the next election and there is half the country or 60 of the country thinks that the totals theyre seeing on the screen are not what people voted, i mean dysfunction that im sure Vladimir Putin would be very happy to see. Mr. Carlin and it doesnt take a change in the vote count, right. So what i used the Syrian Electronic Army example of there was a day essentially of confusion where they pretended that there was a terrorist attack on the white house, cost the stock market billions of dollars. What if there was a similar style Misinformation Campaign on the on election day . Then no one would trust that it didnt affect the vote count and youd know that a foreign power did it. So its these sideways attacks that weve continually seen to be effective now and that we need to think about, prepare for so that were and the the buzzword in corporate sector and Corporate Governance is resilience, not can we absolutely prevent it from happening, but how do we make sure. But here its not Corporate Governance, its our governance and we dont seem to have a similar focus. Ms. Angwin well, i think that transparency is a key part of it, right. So theres just too much secrecy in government right now and theres overclassification. And so that has bred a lot of distrust in government and people dont know what to believe. And so we have to build systems that once again the part of the audit thing is transparency, the vote totals have to be in some sort of lockbox or like a citizen committee, a dead man switch whatever group you want to call them, but there do have to be trusted entities that have gone through some public vetting process and people feel vested in and that takes a while to build. Thats institution building. Mr. Manjoo i feel like were all calling for this trusted entity. But like, does anyone does everyone trust a single entity in this country . I mean, thats sort of the fundamental problem, right. Like, we wouldnt be able to find that person who promised us ms. Angwin people trust documents, right. They trust, they do. They trust the wikileaks leaking even if it might or might not be true. Like, were in a world of show, not tell, right. So when it used to be back in the day, you know, we could write a story with three anecdotes. And we are like thats the news. Now you have to show the documents and you have to be scared that you are the person whos leaked them to you who is going to get out because you have to post the documents. But like we are in a show your work mode and thats because we have to build trust again because everyone lost trust. Mr. Brownstein i agree with you though. I dont think there is any set of individuals who could kind of bless the Election Results and everybody would say yeah, you know. I mean, even short of like even short of manipulating the vote totals, what if we get to 2020 and in six key state the number of people who go to the polls and find their registration is invalid is 2 higher than it was in 2016 . I mean like, how do we know what that meant whether something happened or not . And it its just adding this kind of layer of, at a time when i say each side views this in increasingly apocalyptic terms, you kind of layer on to that a question of legitimacy of the result. And these are very corrosive forces. Mr. Manjoo is there some way that what is the role here for the tech platforms, for facebook particularly, google and twitter also which has a huge role in not many people lives but journalist lives . What is the role for them . I mean, specifically with regard to facebook, could Facebook Like somehow bless the election . One of the things that Mark Zuckerberg said after the election was they had looked at all the results and they, you know, thought that the they looked at all their data and they thought that the results matched up with, you know, all of the data that they had, that facebook had about how people were talking about the elections. If there are entities in this country, google and facebook, that sort of know everything, could they, you know, do some kind of, you know, investigation of the election . Ms. Angwin oh my god. I mean mr. Carlin i do think it is there are you can have paper ballots, you can have an auditable trail in terms of the actual vote count. Not every state has implemented in every region would look, one of the reasons we were safer against a foreign powers attempts to change our vote count is we are incredibly inefficient. We have 70,000 different voting systems. And so not all of them have put in a paper trail. But you can that would be auditable. It physically exists. You can go back and check it. Registration rolls will be harder but you could devise a solution. Again, its based on the idea that the digital data, if we connected to the internet, is not going to be our solution. So we need something plus. Mr. Brownstein back to the future. Its back to the future. Mr. Carlin and thats been true. You look at the russian attacks on the ukrainian electric grid. The only reason ukraine didnt suffer so these were real 31 attacks by russian actors that knocked out the power grid, one of the nightmare scenarios weve talked about a long time in terms of our structures inside the United States. They did it there but they were able to get back and running. Why . It was 30 years out of date and they still had people who know how to operate systems manually. We are rapidly moving towards a on purpose, were moving towards an arena where nobody would, even your car, no ones going to know how to manually fix it anymore because its basically a computer. So maybe with some of these systems knowing the risk, you do a you build in security by design so that it can be operated manually or have an audit in place. Ms. Angwin i mean we do need a jobs program in this country also. So i mean it seems like a nice mesh. Mr. Manjoo we should end by talking about the role for Law Enforcement here. One of the things weve learned since the election is that, you know, the Obama Administration knew to varying various parts of the administration knew that the russians were attacking us in various ways. They did something but not, according to a lot of people, enough, not a lot. What could they have done and is there any sort of is there any sort of way they could have stopped this or warned people . What should we do, sort of, next time this happens . Mr. Carlin well, i think look, what was done was too little too late because it didnt have the desired effect. The desired effect would be that the russian would feel their attempts to interfere in our Democratic Institutions was a failure and they wouldnt do it again. Thats not what happened. So you can judge it. It didnt work. Looking ahead, i mean one thing is if were moving towards which is relatively new in cyberspace of being more transparent, for years i knew in government that china was inside our system stealing billions of dollars worth of intellectual property and that was classified. It wasnt until 2012, i think that as a Government Official i could talk publicly about it and it wasnt until 2014 that i oversaw the first case, where we brought charges against members of the Peoples Liberation army and just laid out exactly what they were doing, it was very controversial at the time. So this approach is new. With russia, we did figure out who did it. We did make it public prior to the election on october 7th. We did not do the deterrent action until december 29th. If that had happened preelection, you guys are more of the expert on how it would have been covered, but that may have been more of a i think russia would have reacted more strongly, it would have been more of a substantial brushback than doing it after the results. Mr. Brownstein the thing i wonder about is certainly russia will look at 2016 and say this worked well enough, theyre going to try it again. But i wonder about, like, it worked well enough for russia, that why wont domestic actors try it again more. And will how will we react . Will we accept that, you know, kind of the politics has always been information or this is ok, this is new this is acceptable for a group of democrats to try to hack the Trump Campaign and leak everything or for the, you know, trump to hack democrats and leak everything . Will we accept that this is just a new front in an ongoing war or will this somehow be disqualifying and delegitimizing . Id like to think the end the latter, but i dont think so. I think that, you know, that people view the stakes so high that the kind of by any means necessary view is taking over in big parts of the electorate. And, you know, i just kind of think of how many comments i got after talking on cnn about the russia leak was like, well, who cares who provided it. Who cares who put this out. What matters is whats in the emails. Ms. Angwin well, we just dont have enough hacking prosecutions to begin with. I mean theyre really hard to do. And theyre particularly hard to do with russians, right, extradite, et cetera. But the truth is like it is illegal for one of these campaigns to hack the other one and they should not you know, that they should be prosecuted for it. Mr. Brownstein it wouldnt be not even campaign. I think like something, you know, one degree of separation. Ms. Angwin well, yeah, they will find a third party. But that person is also committing a crime, right. So, like we are still a nation of laws. Im not saying Information Warfare at all costs. I just think that, you know, there will be crimes committed and then they should be prosecuted. But separately i do think the answer, i really just lean heavily on transparency and auditing. Its super boring and its not exciting buzzwords but they have served us well for a long time. And i do believe if we could build that into these new systems then we can have all the good stuff and, you know, have our cake and eat it too. Mr. Manjoo and you mean specifically like in the in the Voting Machines or where else do you mean . Ms. Angwin well, i do think in political discourse. Like, we have never had a system right where you cant see political ads after theyve run, right. I can pull up a tv ad in any station, they have to log who bought it, how much they paid, et cetera, at the local New Hampshire outlet. I cant see a facebook ad now, right. So i mean there is there are gaps in our system that we havent accounted for, right. Theres not a good fec spending report for what was spent on facebook. We dont know about the dark posts on facebook. Theres a lot of 34 things that could be opened up. But like we have the means to do that. We have regulated those things before. Mr. Manjoo in case we dont solve these issues today, im just going to say Aspen Institute is starting a new program on Cyber Security and technology. We are having a conference october 4th and were going to work on trying to not just talk about but develop some solutions that will go further, whether theyre auditing. I think the solution of the press behaving differently. Ms. Angwin thats not going to mr. Brownstein good luck with that. Good luck with that one. Mr. Manjoo all right. Thank you all. Mr. Brownstein yeah. Thank you. [applause] mr. Manjoo ok. Were going to we have one more part of this. So in the third part were going to be talking about the other thing that was mentioned earlier, which is filter bubbles and echo chambers. In 2008, i wrote a book called true enough learning to live in a postfact society, in which i predicted that because of the fragmentation of the internet and because of the way that we were sort of filtering our media diets that we would you know, we would get to a point where most of what we learned was from partisan sources and the truth will come to matter less. So i think i was right. And so but to talk about this more, we have an all star panel. Lee rainie is the director of internet, science and Technology Research at the Pew Research Center where hes worked since 1999. He also directs the centers new initiative on the intersection of science and society. Hes the coauthor of networked the new social operating system and of five books about the future of the internet. 35 ory rinat, is a Deputy Assistant secretary at the state department focusing on Public Diplomacy and Global Digital communications. And hes the interim white house chief digital officer. Before joining government, he oversaw Digital Strategy at the Heritage Foundation and its news site the daily signal. He was previously a director at Atlantic Media strategies, the digital consultancy of the atlantic. And Rebecca Mackinnon directs the ranking Digital Rights project at new america. She cofounded the Citizen Media Network Global voices and coauthored consent of the networked the worldwide struggle for internet freedom. She previously taught at the university of hong kong and the university of Pennsylvania Law School and has held fellowships at harvards shorenstein and berkman centers, the open Society Foundation and Princeton Center for Information Technology policy. She was cnns bureau chief and correspondent in china and japan between 1998 and 2004. And she serves on the board of the committee to protect journalists. So i thought wed start with lee because he has the data. Lets talk about the state of partisanship and polarization in the United States. Is it worse than ever as we constantly hear and what role in that partisanship and polarization, to what role did the media and, sort of, our new media landscape play in that . Mr. Rainie the simple answer is, its the most intense that its been in the time that its been measured but it hasnt been measured for very long. But there are a couple of special dimensions to it now that have not shown up in the data in years gone by. The first thing thats happened over the past 30 years is theres been an purification of our political parties, 92 of democrats are now more liberal than this moderate republican, 94 of republicans are more conservative than a standard issue democrat. Thats new in our culture, we used to have liberal republicans and conservative democrats. Now thats hardly the case and there has been a rise and at the extreme ends of the spectrum, a doubling since 1994 of the people who are absolutely consistently liberal or absolutely consistently conservative, they are the most active engaged actors in our system and thats driving at least part of the politics. The second part of it is that its become intensified people have different and more harsh views about the parties themselves. The democrats feel that the republicans are performing less favorably than in the history of their party and republicans feel the same way about democrats and thats risen twofold in the past generation. The third dimension of it is becomes personalized. There are ways now that people treat each other as people based on their partisan labels. And so now were picking up for the first time in our data, that democrats and republicans say about each other that they are not just misguided or wrong in their ideas, they are we are literally afraid of the other team. And the other team just doesnt have sort of subpar ideas, there are actually their ideas will do great harm to the republic. And the way that this cascades through the system this probably coincides with the rise of the balkanized media culture and its hard to impute the era of causality in all of that, but it all this stuff cascades through the culture in really important ways, so you get a formula for a culture that doesnt like itself. So now 64 nate was kind enough to mention 64 of americans now think fake news is so bad that its hard for americans to get good basic facts about current events, 81 of americans feel that the parties themselves and the supporters of the opposite candidate cant agree on the basic facts, 81 say they cant even agree on the foundation of whats going on, 60 subscribe to the notion theres such a fog of information out there i find it hard to get to the truth. And just to make it really sort of personal, all 37 of this stuff comes down to the very intimate level because 26 of americans say theyve had false information about them posted online. So this is not just a political and ideological phenomenon, its a phenomenon that now is taking place at the personal level. Mr. Manjoo one question about that and i will open now out to everyone, when i sort of talk about the way that the internet is sort of fragmented politics, people always say thats how it was at the earliest part of the United States that we were originally, before kind of mass media society, we were more polarized as a society, whats different now in both media and how we respond to media from you know i understand you didnt do polls back then, but. Mr. Rainie well, the simplest thing to say about it is that its way more visible now than it ever has been before. So whatever it was then, people can see more of it now. They can see more stupidity. They can see more ignorance. They can see more fake news. They can see more disputes and these disputes can go on for longer and longer because theres no incentive in the system to shut them down, why not keep fighting over things. So they have a sense that the culture is constantly at war with itself and its constantly divided among disputing parties that just cannot be reconciled. Mr. Manjoo what do you guys think about that, any thoughts about either of those . Ms. Mackinnon well i mean just to pick up on many of the threads from the previous sub panel, i mean we do have a problem also in which societys immune system is very weak or very susceptible and theres this negative feedback loop thats taking place. Then perhaps being exasperated by a lack of transparency in a number of places etc. It all mixes together in a negative feedback loop that makes it harder to reform politics, deal with gerrymandering, deal with Campaign Finance because it is feeding on one another. Harder to deal with Economic Issues as you cannot get consensus around any policy. The solution is not going to be easy. But it is going to require, you know, people in a position who have control over technologies whether theyre regulators, whether they are companies to really think okay, how do we want this to be designed and managed in a way thats going to contribute to the kind of society we want to live in. And its we have another session coming after this thats going to deal more indepth with that question very specifically, but its theres no simple fixes. In germany, theres been laws proposed as mentioned earlier to deal with fake news. And the problem is that technically when companies are trying to stamp out speech that is unwanted they make a lot of mistakes, activists and journalists get censored accidentally as well. And the other issue is, is there any solution or any approach you take to addressing these problems because of the unique nature of the internet, its kind of a global impact. Its not just going to affect americans, its going to affect people in syria fighting assad and isis, right. So if you say okay, we need to get rid of anonymity, we need to weaken encryption so that we can catch the bad guys here at home so that we can better identify the bad actors in our systems. Well, theres some people over in syria who just toast right and also investigative journalists in a lot of countries as well who are trying to bring the truth to 39 light, theyre under attack not only by extremists and kind of groups that do not believe in global values, but also by their own governments, in many cases. And all of this then feeds back into our own environment, that makes putin stronger, it makes lots of situations harder, makes young people in many cultures more susceptible to terrorist messages because theres no strong alternative views. So its a very difficult problem to deal with, very intertwined. Mr. Manjoo thanks for the high note. Ms. Mackinnon but you know i mean this is why in other places and in other times and in the long run if you dont double down on protecting Civil Liberties, human rights and freedom of expression globally, its going to get harder to mr. Manjoo but the internet does do that. Ms. Mackinnon were going to be were going to be even weaker in our ability to address the problems. Mr. Rinat i think were being way too negative about the internet and i think it does a lot of those things and when you think about it the underlying kind of theme of this, the major problem that is spoken or not so spoken is were talking about how certain platforms seem to provide people with information that reaffirms what they already think. But its not like facebook said, hey youre conservative, i think youre conservative, im going to keep showing you conservative content. They said, im going to show you things from the people you know. And im going to show you content from the pages you like. And when you start clicking on those things, im going to figure out whose content you seem to like and keep showing you more of that. And had facebook not done that we wouldnt be having this conversation because they wouldnt have grown to the scale to which they grew today. They did that by giving users the things they naturally want, content from people they know, 40 conversations with people they know and as nate explained earlier thats not all that different than offline conversation. So we have facebook, but the internet is not just facebook and facebook traffic to publishers is dropping and thats why publishers arent making money the way they used to a couple of years ago. And when you look at other things on the internet there are factors that really do build on democracy, wikipedia, no its not the best source in an academic paper, well wikipedia is effectively crowd sourced and it is a place where you do see people on both sides working on a particular article, coming to Something Like a middle ground, something fairly balanced. Its not all doom and gloom. Mr. Manjoo i think you have to start right, that sort of networked organizations like wikipedia maybe sort of one way out of this. Mr. Rainie yeah, the big story that probably underlies the problems that were talking about here is the collapse of trust in Major Industrial age institutions and its across the board except for the u. S. Military at the national scale, it involves the church, it involves the media, it involves businesses, it involves Public Schools and what has come to take its place in many peoples minds is their own personal networks. So when they encounter information that they dont really know about they will consult their buddies to figure out whether its true or false or whether to give it a lot of weight as theyre trying to assess their lives or whether to give it a little weight and networked organizations and networked personal structures are the coin of the realm, in this age. So wikipedia is a perfect example of it, open source communities have worked out amazing protocols now where people can fact check each other and give each other positive feedback loops and come 41 together to solve collective problems and things like that. And so there are Network Solutions to a lot of this stuff, it doesnt write you a new healthcare law and it doesnt necessarily fix the tax code but there are sort of supporting civil structures that are emerging from the networked world that are pretty promising. Ms. Mackinnon i mean if i could just jump in on im really glad you raised wikipedia. That community has emerged also kind of outside of the commercial need to make money from advertising and that kind of thing and is really revolves around what is in the interest of the community and the community developed its own governance structures that work quite well, even though lots of people dont agree at all. And i guess this is one of the problems, i do wish that actually facebook would perhaps learn a bit more from wikipedia about mr. Manjoo they are i mean they really are. Ms. Mackinnon how to manage content in a way which is good if they are, because i think we need to kind of Bring Community interests into this a lot more rather than just whats going to bring us the most clicks, whats going to bring us the most advertising dollars and not to harp too much on facebook. I agree with julia and others that the media is the traditional news media has been somewhat to blame in this, is that theyve been kind of using social media as a way to drive traffic and reacting to it in a way that doesnt always serve the Public Interest either, trying to maximize their own ability to go viral online rather than what stories are the ones the public really needs to know about. Mr. Manjoo and facebook is learning from wikipedia and when you look at their steps over the past 42 i dont know, year or so especially their war on clickbait and viralnova and all those sites with horrendous headlines, theyve attacked those through crowd sourcing and we saw an example earlier of letting users report particular kinds of content and then looking at when theres a Critical Mass of those reportings, investigating those situations and using those using those signals from the audience to figure out how to make tweaks and how to push that back against those sources of information that are getting reported in particular ways. But i guess whats the alternative, do we want facebook saying hey youre conservative, all your friends are conservative, or youre liberal, all your friends are liberal heres 10 percent of your content from the other side. How would they do that . Theyd have to start scoring content or scoring people on a left to right scale and making that subjective determination. I dont want facebook making those choices and when you think about it all of us are making those choices. The internet has been good for democracy and does allow people to find other viewpoints if they want that. If you want other viewpoints you will find them youll know people who have other viewpoints and youll be able to see them or you can find them on google or you can find them in other places. Mr. Rinat as to your so your specific suggestion of facebook doing that showing you other points of view, so i mean theyve tried that and they found that people just dont click on them, like the thing that were really worried about here that maybe like the question we should ask is, why is it facebooks place, why are we saying its facebooks place to give us a diverse source of media . Facebook calls it does not call itself a media company, theyve sort of deliberately avoided that term. They dont think of themselves in the way the New York Times thinks of itself, they think of themselves as a 43 way to connect friends and family. So why should it be their place to, it shouldnt be. Ms. Mackinnon i dont think anybody here up here has been saying it should be though. I think they need to be more transparent about whats happening; theyre starting to do that. They have been taking steps to involve their community more in how we go from here, but ultimately it has to do with the fact that users, the community out there human beings dont trust, the lack of trust within society, the lack of trust within politics, those youre not going to deal with that online that is so we have to address it much more fundamentally through policy. Mr. Manjoo well its also that what drives social engagement, what drives internet engagements it shares and thats not a social media thing, thats back to forwarding chain emails, it gets its when people share thats the source of engagement and what drives people to share, its anger, its sadness, its inspiration, its really where it happens. But its rare that somebody says wow, i just read an objective fascinating piece that represents both sides, let me share it on facebook. Thats not what people share. And so what happens is weve incentivized, as a society, sensationalism in journalism. I was given example earlier during the transition there was an article in a publication that should not be named it said something along the lines of trump transition website lifts passages from nonprofit group. Okay, doesnt sound that great. A couple of paragraphs in they mentioned that the website actually sourced and cited the nonprofit, couple of paragraphs later they quote the ceo of the nonprofit saying it was okay. A couple of paragraphs later they quote a lawyer saying even if it wasnt okay, even if they didnt have permission and even if they didnt cite it was probably still legal. 44 but that headline was so sensationalized and people want to click on something that makes them angry and so everybody just needs to take a breath and its not the internets fault. Mr. Rinat well its the internet ad models fault right . Its the fact that those sites facebook, every news site you can think of, is getting paid based on clicks. So is sort of the fundamental fix here some other Business Model for online news and Everything Else . Mr. Manjoo sure, i just cant think of one. Mr. Rinat right. Ms. Mackinnon and its not a Business Model. Mr. Rinat what do you mean . Ms. Mackinnon this is this is the challenge. I mean you know, do you want we dont have a society in which people are going to allow their tax dollars to be substantially used to support media, that is not commercially driven, thats not where the society is going. There are pros and cons to public media in other countries, in the state media and so on. So it is a problem, but certainly ad driven media is part of it. I dont think we know exactly what the solution is other than that there needs to be more experiments, there needs to be more community media, Citizen Media you know mr. Rinat subscriber driven media. Ms. Mackinnon subscriber driven media. Mr. Manjoo i dont want to be a shill for my employer but this is why we like the New York Times sort of new Business Model is to get subscriptions. And people are subscribing, does that give any of you some 45 measure of optimism, not about the New York Times but about people pointing at people stuff. Mr. Rinat yeah and thats not the only one you look at quartz and Atlantic Media publication, when they launched they were selling ads based on shared voice, they were getting advertisers to say okay, i know that i dont know exactly how many views im getting for this, but i want to be aligned with your brand. And thats kind of the driver behind native advertising. And we were talking earlier in the last panel about the Google Ad Networks and so on. I dont want to stress too much about display ads and how theyre targeted, because nobody clicks on display ads and it doesnt matter if theyre on the New York Times or served up on a google ad network, its the format thats broken. And so why is the stuff working, why are we seeing people chase this, its because its what engages users. Facebook is successful because it delivers a good user experience. It delivers content that people want to read. We can do that as consumers, as media organizations, but it cant be by driving up these archaic display ads. Mr. Rainie can i refine the notion about what an echo chamber is, because i think that the chain of circumstances that people have in their heads when theyre describing that phenomenon is that people literally lock themselves in an information bubble and refuse to engage alternative points of view and only build personal networks around likeminded folks. In fact, the more interesting thing that we see just across the board in our data is that the most highly engaged, the most intense partisans, the people who are driving whats going on in this country actually know a lot about the opposing points of view to them and they are very engaged with others who have those views in part because its an argumentative culture. 46 so its not reinforcing your views, youre building your repertoire of facts and information so that you can argue and reason well with the people you know youre going to disagree with and theyre a whole host of people, by some measures it might be more than half of social media users who are living way apart from this phenomenon, they post no political content and little or nothing that comes into their feed relates to political content. So the divider here or the separation here might not be between the echo chambers and engaged folks who are who engage multiple points of view, but its echo chambers and something approximating empty chambers. This is just not part of their life. They dont care for. Mr. Manjoo yeah as to your first point i mean i rarely watch cable news, but i know everything that sean hannity said last night and everyone on cnn and everyone else because its all on twitter and i dont have a my twitter feed is journalists. So its partisans on each side. So is that happening i mean are people, is that what you mean by people getting sort of the opposing side, theyre looking at sean hannity videos, liberals are looking at sean hannity videos to make fun of it . Mr. Rainie thats a lot of their motivation. The other thing thats going on that has gotten much less attention than it probably deserves these is a longstanding communications phenomenon called the spiral of silence and it was enshrined by research coming out of nazi germany, where researchers went to people who supported nazism but who clearly werent likely to act on it, or things like that. And they said, why did you do it, why did you let them get away with it . And they were so afraid of being in violation of their social circles, of having a minority point of view or not raising their voice for fear of what their neighbors would do to them, its now the internet might have broken that, the internet because it enables lots of people in lots of ways to speak 47 out and speak out anonymously if they think theyre in a minority point of view. The fact of the matter is perfectly replicated online. People if they think their facebook or twitter followers will agree with them are much more likely to talk about it than not and in fact if they think their facebook and twitter followers disagree with them, they wont even bring it up in a persontoperson context. They think the world is a little bit arrayed against them and theyre scared of saying what they worry might lose them a friend or start an argument. Mr. Manjoo when youre talking about echo chambers and bubbles theres also the information bubble youre talking about and youre talking about how youre getting the full spectrum of cable news filtered to you on twitter and youre seeing everything. How many people here are from washington or new york, every time i go out to dc and im in another city and i say im from dc, the first question i get is always, is it like house of cards. And thats funny but at the same time theres that information gap, but on the other hand you look at some of the things that have kind of cut through the clutter recently. Stown the podcast was actually a great example of this, it was a way to show people what a different part of america lives like, feels like, experiences. And it did tremendously well, i doubt many people listening to the podcast have the same political views as the people it was about. Mr. Rinat another optimistic note i think that its entirely possible that facebook and twitter wont be the way, the predominant way that we get news in 10 years or 15 years or even 5 mr. Manjoo or 2. Mr. Rinat you know one thing i have been using a lot recently is snapchat, snapchat is theres no virality you cant really like share stuff to your 48 friends, theres news on it, but its curated by snapchat and some of its made by snapchat. And the way that they cover like some Natural Disaster for example is everyone who uses snapchat will send in videos of their experience of flooding or something and youll see many, many different peoples perspectives in a short two or three minute video, which is so much more informative than sort of a cable news clip of that same thing. Well first of all its hard to find coverage of like nonpolitics on cable news anymore, but even if you did it would be difficult to have this wide range of views and it could be, i mean i dont know if snapchat will succeed or not, but facebook might copy all those features and then you might figure we have those kinds of things in facebook also. Mr. Manjoo okay, yes i agree. Mr. Rainie the other thing thats been so interesting to watch we havent quite documented because its hard to talk to people about as i think its broadened peoples sense of what is news. So all of that stuff thats happening in a cluster of your Friends Network is news to you that wouldnt rise to the level of something even maybe a local news outlet would cover, but youre better off for knowing it and youre more engaged with your buddies for knowing it and theres a way that this intimacy that the internet is absolutely the core affordance of the internet is that kind of intimacy thats maybe the wave of the future. Mr. Manjoo im excited by all the opportunities in the space and if you think about it facebook found an unmet need and filled it and then snapchat said, what can we do thats different and better and serves a different need. And somebody is going to disrupt snapchat and you know nobody in the 14 to 20 old range is using facebook right now. Weve all seen the pew studies that show that. So whats next . Whats going to 49 disrupt snapchat . Whats going to disrupt the ad models were talking about, the content models were talking about . Its not that its cyclical, it is a constant evolution and somebody is going to crack the code and facebooks going to either buy them, learn from them or evolve. Ms. Mackinnon i think youre right and you know i started out kind of on the negative side, but i work with a lot of communities that would be completely unheard if it werent for the internet. But i do think that new technologies and innovations arent kind of automagically going to take us to a more democratic and kind of human rights and just World Without some mindfulness on the part of people building these things. And i do think there need to be principles around transparency, around accountability, around really being responsible. Mr. Rinat you mean for technologies . Ms. Mackinnon for technologies and also for governments and everybody who has an impact on how these technologies are shaped to really be thinking about okay, you know, can this be abused and if abuse of power, of information power, if abuse of the ability to conduct Information Warfare or to enable it takes place, can we even know whos abusing their power, can we hold them accountable and responsible . And if companies abuse their power for or governments abuse their power via networks we need to be able, it needs to be auditable, it needs to be held accountable and you can design for that or you can do design for more opacity in ways that can empower incumbents. And so i agree with your optimism in the long run, but i do think people need to be mindful about how theyre designing these things. Mr. Manjoo in principle and in theory and not to add on a point of disagreement, but that sounds great, but whos going to enforce that . What top down mechanism is going to make that viable and then do the abuses or the 50 issues or the challenges move up to that oversight level and i guess, i dont know, you guys know i work, i only trust the market to get this right. Ms. Mackinnon well, the enforcement doesnt have to be topdown right. You can have consumers and investors. Mr. Rinat i mean it could be like wikipedia, right . Ms. Mackinnon yeah, or you know i mean there are a lot of you know i run a project project where weve started to rank companies on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy. And the hope and were working with Consumer Reports and the idea is that once you have a more informed public, once youre making it clearer, precisely what the Different Companies are doing exactly who is informing us a bit more about what theyre doing with our data and how theyre manipulating what we see and cannot see that there will be more pressure to do well. So i think you know, im not saying its a topdown sort of government solution necessarily, i think there are a lot of mechanisms around auditing and accountability and companies have responded to pressure that didnt come from government to issue what are called transparency reports that give us more information about how theyre responding to government censorship and surveillance requests that didnt, that wasnt a government regulation thing, that was coming from a whole set of different kind of Civil Liberties and human rights actors and investors as well. And so i think we can kind of push and work with companies to move in the right direction. Mr. Manjoo okay, i think we have to end it there. Thanks so much everyone. [applause] cspans washington journal. Ive every day coming up this morning, as a of the Rand Corporation discusses north korea tensions. James grossman talks about the debate over removing confederate monuments. 2018avid wasserman on the midterm elections. Be sure to watch cspans washington journal coming up at 7 00 a. M. This morning. Join the discussion. On newsmakers, jb pursed talks about 2018 senate races, the impact of president trumps comments following the events in charlottesville, and the midterm elections, the Senate Primary in alabama. Newsmakers today at 10 00 a. M. And 6 00 eastern on cspan. Tonight, carl cannon recounts events in u. S. History that happened on specific dates throughout the year in his big. In his book on this dates and its gone down really heavy. It was uranium. It was the components for the atom bomb that would be dropped in adam in japan. It is so topsecret that the navy doesnt do the things they normally do. And the ship, after he delivers his cargo, it heads out to rendezvous what may be the battle for japan. But it doesnt get an escort. Theres no destroyer is good. Not enough. Destroyer escort. 900 guys go into the water. Story is nobody is looking for them. They drown, die of dehydration, sharks eat them. Its a horrible story. Tonight at 6 00 eastern on cspans q a. Now Heritage Foundation discussion on ways to reorganize Government Agencies to improve efficiency and lower costs. This is just over an hour