Tonight. My name is rachel miro. I had to look at the sheet of paper to make sure. Am the Senior Editor of our Silicon Valley desk here in san jose. I should say Silicon Valley because we are in mountain view. Joining me on stage is the director of internet ethics, alex damas, the director of the stanford internet observatory and the director of journalism and media ethics at Markkula Center. This evening is copresented with the Markkula Center for applied ethics. This is part of this series on common ground. It is an initiative ream people together for civil discourse, featuring journalists hosting provocative conversations about politics, policy, science and technology. Reckoning with the disagreement among us about how to face the future of economic, culture and environmental uncertainty. This series asks what are our shared responsibilities to the common good. Next in the series if you have an open calendar is this tuesday at the San Francisco exploratory and. We will be looking at how we overcome the polarization. On tos topic. Democracy is under attack worldwide. Populism is on the rise. This information is number one and social media is the platform of choice. What can we do about it . E can start by talking alex, i take it you have some show and to offer us about the . Opic russia is again attempting to influence the American Election for president. Alex that is what we read in the times. That was a briefing given to the house subcommittee on intelligence. But there are no details. We dont know what they mean by that. From my perspective, there are five different kinds of interference in a 2016 election. It is not clear if they are doing any of the same playbooks or something totally different. Exampleshow us a few of what we remember from the 2016 election. Many of us dont remember because we never saw it our feeds. Surprisingly the kqed audience was not the target here. A lot of the russian influence was aimed at the left and right. The two different types of information Information Operations is the term we use to make an attempt to change the information environment. It had two big directions. The first was warfare. That is about the driving division by creating medical means that are injected into applicable discourse. Examples. Se, three they were made by a private oligarch ind by an russia. The one on the left is supposed to be a prolgbt group. This is an lgbt coloring book for Bernie Sanders. That is a funny little thing that you might post with the goal of getting people to join your group and to see your content and then most of the content had nothing to do with elections or politics. It was content like this that drew people in. That would allow them to inject messages later. Russia in 2016 was antiimmigrant sentiment. In the bottom right, this is a twitter account that pretended to be the Tennessee Republican party. The entire time, the social media intern lived in st. Petersburg, russia, not florida. Here is some more from instagram, mostly. It comes from both sides. Get over it. Ne is it is from a fake Instagram Account called blackstagram. A big goal of the russians was to try to build africanamerican support for these fake personas and then inject messages about hillary being racist. It was stolen from bernie as well as messages that might have been seen by conservatives and then seen as being really radical. I will give you guys a second to look at this before i ask you some questions. This is from a fake black lives matter group. Black panthers were dismantled the government because they were standing up for justice and inequality justice and equality. This kind of work by the russians is being done not by intelligence specialists but the Internet Research agency. They were millennials with english miners that could not find better jobs in russia. These people were not professionals. The language was not perfect. Now that i am a fake professor, i do a little socratic method. Who thinks that this being posted by somebody in st. Petersburg, russia is evil illegal . You guys are right. It is not illegal for somebody out of the country to have an opinion about the black panthers even if they are lying whether they are. It is a violation of facebook terms of service to do this. Facebook terms of service do not have the force of law. Is this fake news . The thing here is that theyre not making any falsifiable claims. This kind of argument of what was the reason the United States government prosecuted the black panthers is something you might find in a freshman africanamerican studies seminar. This is an argument that they were trying to amplify. Remind us of the overton window. Real professor, we are all thick professors. Ideaverton window is the of what is the range of acceptable discourse. These are the things that are allowed in any society. In this case, american society. That window can shift back and forth based on people being on the extremes. Does anybody want to guess who got this email . John podesta. This is the email that john podesta received. It was sent by the main intelligence director of the kremlin. We are talking about real people , they like to kill people overseas. That the person tried to break into the account from ukraine. Then said you guys are hilarious. This is a redirector that sends him to a site google accounts. Net. When he got there, it was a perfect looking google login. He asked one of the i. T. People at the dnc whether this was legit or not. Apparently that guy replied it looks ok but meant to say it does not look ok. That would be the most important typo in history of the him and race. Gives theto that and password, the gr you goes. They broke into the dnc using more for technically sophisticated work than this. When they had that information, they were not releasing fake accounts. They were not releasing fake information, a cherry picked the emails that told the story they wanted to tell. That was the story that Bernie Sanders was ripped off in the dnc primary. To do so, they put that message through real emails. People were saying that nesting is about Bernie Sanders. That failed. They tried it again through an that they were pretending was a real leak site. D. C. Leaks reached out to a bunch of journalists and said here are some documents from john podesta into the dnc. They had a real live block of all the most embarrassing things that john podesta did. Even the New York Times ran with the stories over and over again the gremlin. By if you go to paragraph nine or 10, this says that it could be part of a russian operation. But that is the headline is what people are rating. Some other examples of this information around the world, whatsapp two real messages in india. Whatsapp is the most Popular Communications medium there. Whatsapp is not like facebook where you can post something that a Million People see, you can send a message to a two around 200 people. People in india a part of many groups, family groups, school groups, work reps. Messages get passed along by individuals copying and pasting messages that are injected in. Has theon the left support of the congress party. Their enemies. Basically lying about the price of costs in other countries. The one on the right is racist. Ropaganda if you look at this, it is saying i am from a black lives matter group. See this information disinformation, it is from your coworker or your uncle. The theory is that the group is about a Million People who have signed up to push this information and they dont believe in disinformation, they just believe it is the right news. On behalf of the political party. They get notifications from the official group and then they spend all day sending out to the other 400 Million People. Then we are still seeing this russian lead activity around the world. This is the report that our team wrote. What we found was a Disinformation Network in africa. This time aligned with wagner group. That is a company he owns that mercenaries. Ary people that go into countries to kill people with the support of autocrats. They are supporting autocrats on the ground with guns and disinformation. It looks like we are not doing for the Foreign Policy outcomes of russia but for the personal financial benefit. He has things like diamond mines and the like. He is backing two of the six people vying for control of libya to get gas and oil rights in the future. From. 16esting changes 2016 is this is no longer people sending in st. Petersburg. They were reported back to people in st. Petersburg. One of the guys doing it made a mistake and he posted a picture moscowtrip to nazca on his Instagram Account. The people doing this work in sedan are actually sitting in sudan so it is hard to catch them. Their language is better, their cultural knowledge is better. It is multimedia. This is a whole newspaper that seems like a legitimate newspaper. That is mostly not about russia and Foreign Policy, it is just a newspaper. The entireilding pipeline, they can manipulate the media but they also create their own media and the amplify that media online. Lets start with that. Rachel that is a little overwhelming. Yes, thank you. Be differento things to parse out in alexs presentation. One of the first thing that occurs to me is the question of whatsapp. There are 70 people around the world who are unencrypted platforms if you will. There are so many people around the world who are on encrypted platforms. Less good joben when the information is encrypted. Is a particular case where there is whatsapp is used in india but in restaurants, it is to pass mail out people in the communities. Tooke in that community other stuff from the restaurant and then they come and pick it up. Afterwards, the Restaurant Owner will share some video with you on whatsapp. There is an interpersonal acceptance of liberal privacy like i dont mind you sharing something with me even though i dont really know you. Different. , it is a kind of sensibility. If i get a Whatsapp Message with the video from somebody i dont even know, first of all, i may not have a whatsapp connection with people in that sense. That is a huge advantage these actors have in places like india where whatsapp is literally an interpersonal thing. That is one thing. One of the things it will help to understand is it existed because of the centralized paradigms of ownership in the media from print to radio. As long as media was owned by a few organizations, 10, 20, 30, there was a cultural sensibility and acceptance of values built in. You and i have a microphone, we can amplify our speech. There is no such thing as an acceptable window for what is acceptable in a democracy for public speech. That is what is broken. Question is who is responsible for the changes in the window. It was not that long ago that social media started. When it started, people were not sharing news articles. The whole idea of social media was to connect you with your friends and your family. At some point, that paradigm shifted. Part of the responsibility lies with social Media Companies that have certain afford and says. You shouldyou to say be able to use this for this or that. Mark zuckerberg came out and said we want to be everybodys personalized newspaper. Facebook was not something people thought of as a personalized newspaper. Suddenly there is this whole encouragement, you should be sharing news stories. Suddenly you have your aunt phyllis and i endorse this message. Suddenly you have i am your aunt phyllis and i endorse this message. I think one of the early promises of the internet, the way people saw it was with the advent of blogging. I remember people saying that we are all journalists now. Turns out we are not. On social media, turns out we are loudspeakers for other peoples messages. That is a different role. We all bought into this role. We find ourselves doing it. Talk about response ability, we have to talk about these different layers. I found an interesting poll that was done last month by npr, pbs newshour. They asked people who should have the main responsibility for addressing disinformation. Addressing disinformation is pretty vague. Whether it is not to do it, not to respond to it, highlighted, the numbers are these, 30 said the media have the main response about he for addressing this information. 18 did to technology companies. Half as many. 15 of the government and 12 to the public. To the government and 12 of the public. 29 of democrats assigned the main responsibility to the media and 59 of republicans do. We are polarized even on who is responsible for doing something about this. A journalist, people dont want to accept the information they receive. You say this is it, i have the answer for the question you had and the responses that is not what i believe. As if it is a matter of opinion. Are not looking for information, theyre looking for confirmation and they are looking to signal identity and to be part of a certain group. This. Singly reading the point is not to inform people but to say this is what i believe. I think what is really interesting for the rest of us is that we have these calming him and weaknesses that make us do the same thing even if we dont intentionally mean to. What i definitely learned, my colleagues say have to check myself all the time. If i find something that is absolutely the best illustration of what i believe, this just occurred and it totally confirms everything i believed. I just have to sit on it. More often than not, it is a set up. It is designed for people like me to respond that way and to perpetuately and to that missed medication and misinformation. It is often not an outright lie. It is out of context or it is made to push a certain narrative. As recently as two years ago, soas among those who was behind the times. Unable to find their lefthand and righthand. Of course, it would be no position to craft laws that would be out of date as soon as the ink was dry. Know, the whole disinformation situation online is such a dumpster fire. I dont know that there is anybody who is on top of it. Even if they did nothing but read facts all day. What can we do from a regulatory standpoint to try and control some of this . Is that hopeless task . In the United States, we are stream a limited by the First Amendment. Extremely limited by the First Amendment. If i look like im a stay with my eyes open, sorry im a little tired. It turns out the best majority of things people complain about with what is called cb 230 is the First Amendment. They complain that political speech has almost never any criminal or civil liability in the United States. The Supreme Court has said that in most cases, it is not a crime. A crime if you live. Most of the stuff we are talking about is something you would never be able to adjudicate as false anyway. The regulatory in the United States is theres is not a lot of options here. Even other countries, this has mostly been about things that were already legal. Of the regulation has been ae next law was which was 27 letter german word. That is a law that requires the Tech Companies to enforce german hate speech law. False. Ot about true or even that has had real issues when it starts to apply to things like sarcasm and comity and the like. States, thed the content ofot but the message mechanisms that people can do messaging. I would like to see rules that figure out everybody is guessing what the rules for political advertising are online. The fcc has not ruled about how these 80s and 90s laws apply to 2020. I would like to see restrictions for political ads about what kind of targeting you can do. A minimum size. I have seen a couple of tote bags. Lets not pretend that people here dont signal. Here are multiple people that have given pledge drives. And if you havent, rachel knows your name. You have to advertise to much broader sense of people and have rules around transparency. My colleagues at stanford that study these issues believe you can have these laws as long as they are content neutral. Toular this page regulate the speech of individuals in the United States will effectively never happened. One of the things that is, to all of them is the visuals in them. I ended up having to ask myself three types of questions. Who are these actors . Good actors, bad actors. A different type of vocabulary is if this is a supply or demand side. These people are supplying you information. It could be people, it could be anything. Everybody is posting. Kind ofd thing is what behavior is actually going on . They are respecting you to expecting you to instinctively believe that thing and then expecting you to share this. There is an implication of fast thinking. Is a very famous book called thinking fast and slow. The easy way to understand this is they are making you think really fast. When we think fast, we will act with our biases. Takee not going to decisions based on this. The idea is click your way to really quick activity. That is the application. This place to it they already want to share. The a poster that is to actually slow people down. In the midst of all of the other what canou have the public to . The only thing i would ask for is when you see something that is too good to be true or you up,feel a feeling creeping you know that feelings drive behavior. The first thing we all have to do is slow down. Line that came out of a south indian film. It is about an anticorruption actor. It essentially says that for the truth to win, you need evidence, you need authority, proof. Confusion is fast, the truth is slow. All good things take time to emerge. Story withhere was a antarctica hitting 69. 3 degrees. We are not certifying this weather station, we want to verify this. All of the other stations had a valid number. Baby nobody ever heard of antarctica hitting this high. This is what it takes for scie