Information dissemination. [inaudible conversations] can we have everyone sit down, please . Thanks. Thank you. Hi. Welcome to the second session of todays sim pose yuck. This titled combating online information operations. Im karen, senior fellow for digital policy and were lucky of the hes experts to discuss this issue. Renee, thomas, and clint. I anticipate a very lively and fascinating conversation. Want to start with thomas. When the Supreme Court decided Citizens United it predicated the whole idea that corporations should be able to spend my in elects because the internet, which was then seen as this great engine of transparency and democracy, the arab spring was going on the internet would be full transparency to american elections, and that was the magic bullet. And at the time i was in the obama administration. We were really taken with the idea of internet freedom, but it seems that since then the openness of the internet, which we hoped would solve a lot of political problems, undernine authoritarian governments, is almost being used to undermine democracy by some authoritarian governments. Can you give us a little history about information operations, what have we been missing and what do we need to pay more attention. To. Yeah. Thank you. I am happy to try to provide some history. Im writing a book on the history of disinformation right now so please stop me if i start to get into too much detail there disinformation or active now use the sold soviet term of art, which emerged in early 60s is a very old phenomenon, and if we go look at the cold war, we literally have hundreds more likely thousands of examples of small individual active measures and disinformation operations. I interviewed a few people who actually worked in active measures for their entire career. You may be able to hear in my funny accent, im german, so i initially interviewed some an disinformation operator which was extraordinary, and from one of them i have this they thought the best mix between truth and fact, truth and lie, is 8020, 80 true, 20 false. That makes it really hard for journalists or experts like us to tell what is actually true and what is factual and what is not factual. So lets make an example of a particularly vicious operation from the year 1960. That was revealed in a congressional hearing in mid1980s. In 1960, this is the context is decolonization, and many african countries, newly independent, wondering whether they should join the west or the soviet bloc. And in that context sudden lay pamphlet appeared, 16 page cam met appeared in 15 different african countries, in french as well as english, and the pamphlet contained pictures and text, and it was about tight upped to our dear friends it and was on the face of it written by an African American in the United States, an africanamerican organization to africans in africa, explaining to them the true ugly face of American Culture at home it and was full of racial discrimination, lynchings, in the south, Police Violence against africanamericans. I checked and went through the press reports at the time, and almost every single detail in those 16 pages is completely accurate, down to very gruesome details wont repeat here. But this is an example of an techtive measure that was a real headache for to state department. Very difficult to counter because it was based in truth. But at the same time, under a false cover of a nonexistent organization. So its just one of literally hundreds of examples that i think highlights some methods of operation that we still see today. So, clint, you have been talking about how the u. S. Has to respond for quite some time, and we see that some other western democracies, there is a response to the information operations. Can you talk at bit about what seems to be working, what might be interesting models . I dont know that anything is working yet. There is some progress. Theres the defense and then theres the sort of countering portion. The europeans get it because theyve been in this game much longer than the United States. Theres the twopart failure in the United States with russian meddling witch didnt understand that hacks were being used for influence, we looked at is as investigations. The second part was this was already going on in Eastern Europe, ukraine, places like that it. Brexit, didnt think it would happen in the United States. We were arrogant to this, it would never come to our shores. Theyre more in the trenches on this. Theyve been dealing with it for a long time. The number one thing they have done over probably a 50year period is called education weapon dont invest in is the same way here but they very much put forward what their sentence is stance is on information and what they deal with. The otherring this theyve started to go ahead and acknowledge when these untruths are being leveraged toward them and in some places czech republic, latvia is out front. I was at the launch in hell sin can i of the hell sin can i of the Hubert Center they but together. They have different audiences. You want to understand russian active measures, its about language, not necessarily about culture, because thats howl you communicate in social media. If you want to track and influence campaign you need to look at the language theyre using and theyre narrating. What is interesting with those countries as opposed to our own is the basic rule youre taught in boxing, dont punch back until your feet are thousand ground. They understand what it want anywhere country and what theyre defend and what their policies are and then counter the influence narrative. We have failed in this for a decade, whether its terrorist or the russian disinformation, and our counterinfluence because we dont really know what we believe in and dont note what we stand for. You cannot counter back, whether its online or on the ground, a counterinfluence campaign unless you know what your nations policies are, what your Belief Systems are and what youre going to push back with. I outcome lee cold war, whether european or here at home, we prodemocracy, nationalists, things we were trying to advance around the world. Right now, i am not sure that the russian message is different than our own here at home. So you cant do counterinfluence or counteractive measures until theres some consensus at whom what we believe here and defend and promote overseas. The narrative around the election weasand eu, antinato, lets Work Together to kill isis, be a nationalist, not a globalist, you first, the world second. How do we counter senate sounds pretty familiar. Just to im just saying in terms of you cannot move forward. The way the europeans are moving forward is even in their own countries they have a baseline from which theyre standing in their counterinfluence campaigns, and they have some consensus around it. They know who is in charge. I dont think we have that here. We got rid of the u. S. Information agency so both structurally and in terms of message, theyre much more grounded and can punch back. Just to pick up on that. One thing ive heard people talk about its just so much easier to be negative. Right. If youre about tearing down a nihilist, east er to get your message couple as if youre in favor of something. Youre saying there has been some success and people have a better ability to articulate about democracy. Not just about democracy, might using the nationalist message in europe, its us first and not our adversary, but they have clear way of communicating to their public can both from a leadership privilege and through their media and public affairs, where they communicate finland, sweden, scanned da navan countries are great examples they communicate to the public clearly, this is what we stand for what and what we believe in. A positive message . Just antirussian. Right. Its nationalist and also about their values. Our biggest challenge right now it will be coming up on the fouryear mark the first time talked about in government audiences, late spring, summer of 2014, the last Government Group that it talked to was three or four months ago and i have the same deer in the headlight look when i talk about this stuff. Not because theyre doing anything wrong. Theyre agencies in the u. S. Government but want to do things, but the way our system works is policy sets requirements, requirements set funding. This is how we move our organizations. Im not sure anyone knows what their role is in countering influence online or who would have the ball. I made pick recommendations. Theyre pretty easy, actually. Fbi should look at investigations of hacks now for hero how might this be used for influence later and thats inoculation strategy. The statestate depth should refute falsehoods immediately. We did in iraq against terrorists and good at it. In the Intel Community we have to decide our strategy around information and influence but no one knows at least i dont know is no charge. Its ban year since this happened now and i havent seen a lot of gears moving in any direction at this point. Lets come back to that. Renee, take us to the private sector and talk about the platforms theyve been doing a lot some of them dog more than others, i think, but putting in more people to review accounts or view posts, to take away monetary incentive for fake news. Talk about where the incentive of the platforms and the incentive to clean it up verse versus theres a betweens between the economic mottle and clean up disinformation. In the private sector, they a problem nobody knows who in charge. They all monetize, their Business Models based on attention. Theyre selling ads and want to keep you on their platform, because if they want to be the one to serve you the ads because thats how they earn revenue. Theres a fundamental case why one fundamental challenges here is doing michigans things to make you happy on the platform and its personalized. You see the things that are likely to make you happy and keep you on the platform, and so when that intersect witches an influence pray, its very carefully tailored. Influence operations have been around for decades. But the vectors of disseptember nation have changed. The ability to personalize the content has changed. The antibiotic to target individuals with exactly what is going to work for them based on a corpus of data that the platforms have accrued about each one of us over years and years of use and feedback loops. What did you click on . Ifed doesnt tell me something about you directly i have correlation to someone who is like you so i can target you through the lookalike audience or custom audience in which i do anybody running aned adder or growing an audience on a platform like facebook is reaching people who are predistoesed to be interested in the content. Its such an effective means of delivery. Thats the base framework. The problem is, if ten years ago the concept of the filter bubble was popular. Showing people what they wanted to see and that was creating information silos. When you look at what has to be done to break people out of that, say these people are more likely to be predisposed to disinformation content, themast are not coming back and tell peopling who view this content that they were targeted. So right now a lot of the conversations we have been having is what are the responsibilities of the platforms. Can we ask them to act against their own economic interests and the interests of society and that was a theme that was underlying the hearings. The way an information appraisal is conducted, its not unique to one network. Might start if you tenant to see the story by put by writing an article, create as content farm or blog or anyone can write anything on the internet. This was supposed to be a great advantage because we all had the opportunity to make our voices heard and get information out there. But i can write something something on hi blog and post it to red did. I can see what resonated with the audience im trying to reach. I think see the ranking of what is moving up the page. Its being voted on by the readers. Theyre endorse it and then take the content that plays intel move it over to facebook, and on facebook i can use an add campaign to grow an audience, and once i have some audience, then i achieve what is called organic left and that the idea that rather than having to pay to serve content, my hundreds of thousands of people who have been on to follow my page or who have joined my group are going to push that content out for me. So facebook has a much larger oddsens than reddit. Iveteed the content on reddit, and there are platform it can see the reaction of the community. Then i can move it to facebook or have people begin to do the sharing work for me, which brings down the costs to run one of these campaigns. At this point i have hundreds of thousands of people disseptember nateing my prop gambling da for fry, and i can take it to twitter. Twitter has a much smaller onens than facebook, twitter has high concentration of media users, a ton on journalists on twitter, millions of trump has 45 million followers. The at that point i can kind of cross the rubicon and i if i can make something trend on twitter or retreat my article, i can at that point pretty much guarantee there will be some Media Coverage of it. Media coverage might debunk it but it doesnt matter because even in the act of debunking it, its still continuing to keep it in the public consciousness. The media can cover it uncritically, which we have seen happen. We call them hoaxes but thats a quaint term. We should really use the term disinformation campaign. If the media doesnt controversy i can start a Conspiracy Theory why the media didnt cover that topic. I ick win either way. Somebody interested in conducting a campaign will do it in a crossplatform strategy and theres one noh one really responsible for shutting it down because the platforms, im told they have some kind of back channel information sharing but we didnt see anything really remarkably effective in 2016, and we have continued to see some interesting hoaxes take place with regard to the alabama election. Right now ongoing. So thomas, talk to us about the concept of organic. What is the rule of the bot in what renee was describing and what is the nature of the problem . Well, bot is certainly an important problem, but before we talk about some of the more technical aspects of am mixification operations on amplification on social media, we should step back and speak about the role of the press, journalists. Historically theres a great line from the head of star si disinformation, is was brilliant. They were better at this than kgb because the main target was west germany so spoke the language and could listen to them they could make german jokes and west germans would laugh about them. As much as germans joke. So they have this what would be the active measures operator without the journalist . The journalist is an integral part of disinformation, and we saw that at play in 2016 in the u. S. Election interfering in a new way. Tease out how it was new. Active measures i mentioned this particularly bad one from 1960. Back in the day were you needed to know what youre doing. They required craftmanship from intelligence operators. Today, or rather in 2016, the active measure was very much industrial scale. They had a lot of data, but the data into the Public Domain through wikileaks and other front, and then it whats journalists of the victim society, the victim country, in this case the out, that actually created the value in terms of the damage done because they went in and looked for the gems and nuggets and reported them and ignored the source. Every journalist0 everybody who thinks, well, now we certainly understand the risks. We wouldnt do the same make the same mistake again. We have to think again two weeks ago, a little thing happened in germany which is remarkable. Two weeks ago, spiegel ran aster about the germany u. N. Ambassador it and what reported he send an email to the u. N. Secretary general asking in am improper way to create a job for his wife. Probably shouldnt have done that. But der spiegel quote from the email that consent to the u. N. General secretarys chief of staff, and they dont say where they got the email from. The next day, an anonymous germ january source says, wait a minute, we know that ap20 is and specifically identify that is a Russian Military intelligence hacked u. N. Systems. Found the email, gave it to a journalist, and he ran the story for the second timement he had done that already a couple months prior, knowing he probably advances the interests of a russian intelligence agency. I think we shouldnt underestimate the competitive the rough competitive nature of journalism in a crisis that is actually created by these social Media Companies. So you have the perfect storm for active measures. Clint, would you pick up on that. Sometimes its the competitive forces, sometimes its ignore raines ignorance and they feel they have no choice, its trending, the bots are pushing it, the president has talk about it. What can be done and if the government if theres a limit to what our government can do, Civil Society is taking measures to push back. Right. He is exactly right. Competition is one of the motives that makes it super easy get to active measures to work. The other one is fear. I you can scare a population, which the russians and the soviets before them were very smart about doing, clam to us messages, hit them with fear and then load up a platal political message theyre more likely to fall for as well you. See that with the benghazi conspiracies and things push around in the social media space. Some people would grab them, vie few but only takes a couple and those with the most followers are mavens in their network and can spread it more quickly. There are things we need to think about. The internet and anonymity. Every counsels to the internet with the best of intentions and those with the most resources, time and the worst intentions, ultimately take control of it. This is you can look at criminals and hackers, what happened to anonymous, by the way, and arent they going around the world marking us transparent and free . Anybody wonder what happened to those guys . The big and the powerful ultimately come to learn how these things work, and if you arent under the rule of law, if you dont have to worry about civil liberties, if you dont have to worry about a free press checking you, youre going to use this system and its happening around the world today. I think myanmar is a great case study how this has been duplicated in a