Day. Challengers in elections, oversight and regulation. For those who didnt see me at the top of the day, im alex gibbons and run law policy at the law school and happy to be hosting you today. Many key areas of challenges, somebody was just saying that theyre feeling a little depressed and we need to try to get the energy up on this final panel of the day. Issues from the fragmenttation from political discourse and new pathways for misinformation, Voter Suppression to election security. This panel is going to add another challenge, the significant challenge that we face in election oversight and preparedness. But also, talk about the Solutions Space as well, which is quite simply what do we do . We have another phenomenal lineup to help answer these questions today. Sitting immediately to my left is the honorable ellen weintraub, the chair of the federal Elections Commission are, right, indeed. Well talk about that a little over the course of the panel, too. She has served as commissioner on sec since 2002, and previously worked in the Political Law Group of perkens cooey and house ethical committee. And next at cloud fair, a web performance and security company. He previously served as long time staffer in the senate where we were colleagues working at National Security council for senator dianne feinstein. The honorable ambassador to the organization for Economic Cooperation and development is now at the German Marshall Fund where shes a founding director of digital and democracy initiative. Finally at the end, Mark Lawrence appelbaum, a georgetown graduate who recently completed on foreign election interference and online threats in u. S. Elections. Well have the same procedures we have in previous panels. Professor weintraub will begin and then down the order. Are we on . Thank you, alex and georgetown for inviting me and asked to talk about regulations in 10 minutes or less is a bit of a challenge. What im going to do is hit on a few of the challenges im personally confronting at sec and then move into a discussion of the article that ive submitted to the symposium issue along with my coauthor tom moore, a proud georgetown law grad. Thank you, tom for helping me to get all of that together because i can assure you without the efforts, georgetown would not be in possession of a draft today. Okay. So number one challenge for me, an election regulation is that we do not have a quorum to make decisions at fec. Were supposed to have six commissioners, were down to three. We lost one, and one two years ago and one five months ago and why none of those positions have been filled you would have to ask the president and the senate because theyre in charge of that, but that is that is huge and it means that we cannot launch any investigations. We cant conclude any investigations, we cant do any rule makings and we cant issue any advisory opinions. So thats a bit of a problem. Although honestly, the second challenge that i confront and have been for quite some time is that even when we had a quorum, it was extremely difficult to get anything done because the commission has been for some years now, extremely eyideologically divided. Fush if youre an equally divided commission, the republican and democratic sides have different views whether any regulation of money in politics is indeed advisable. One example of that is a rule making that has been ongoing, believe it or not, since 2011, just to clarify the rules for disclaimers on Internet Political advertising and we were really pretty much at an impasse and i wasnt getting much engagement on the other side, frankly, for some period of time before we lost the quorum. The Commission Last did a comprehensive look at the internet and politics on the internet in 20062007, that has got to be about a century in internet years ago and there are large areas that are unregulated that really need another look. We saw recently a case where a super pac and the Hillary Clinton campaign were alleged to have coordinated through a whole bunch of communications over the internet and their argument was, well, theres an exception for communications over the internet, except for paid advertising on another persons website. That wasnt this so there forewe could do all sorts of stuff as long as the end result was on the internet. Counsel and two commissioners disagreed with that, but i think that interestingly enough, although it was democratic respondents, it was the democratic commissioners who wanted to proceed and the republican commissioner who blocked the investigation. So that was a problem. Weve seen the internet used as a way of sending both very open messages, candidates posting broll on video on their websites in order to have super pacs pick it up and use it in commercials, and although theyre not supposed to be coordinating as well as more subterfuge using the internet. We have coded messages being tweeted out and a debate over whether that constituted public information, if only the people who knew where to look could actually decipher the messages. So weve had what i described as a digital needle in a virtual hay stack, so weve had a number of challenges at the fec, as i said, even before we lost the quorum and congress is similarly having problems getting anything done, also due to polarization. Its very frustrating to me that the honest ads act hasnt passed which would bring Internet Political ads under the same frame work as broadcast ads and i would also desperately love to see the Congress Pass the deter act or Something Like that. Bipartisan proposals to address foreign interference in our elections by imposing really strong sanctions on anyone who would try it. I dont know why we cant get common sense rules like that passed. Why is all of this important . What goes on on the internet in politics . One third of Young Americans rate social media as the most helpful source of information about the 2016 president ial election, this is after 2016 according to a pew poll. Digital political advertising increased 260 between 2014 and 2018 and theres projected for 2020 to reach 2. 8 billion dollars. So, this is not a small venue. And it is there are, as ive said, large areas that are completely unregulated right now for the symposium. We decided to look not in the fica, but federal Communications Act at section 230. Whats been described as the 26 words that created the internet. No provider or user of an Interactive Computer Service should be treated as the publisher or speaker presented by another information content provider. So, theres this expansive area of exemption from liability from all the internet providers that was created in 1996. So, you know, if our internet regulations from 2007 are out of date, emergency looking at something that was written in 1996, when they specifically said, the sponsors, ron wyden, chris cox, they were trying to protect this baby industry, didnt want to strangle it in its crib. They wanted to allow it to grow. And grow it has. In the last, in the Third Quarter of 2019, amazon had income of 70 billion. Google had income of 40. 3 billion and facebook income of a mere 17. 65 billion dollars. That was just in one quarter. So, i dont know that we can fairly say that theyre still babies in their cribs that we need to coddle and protect, and while originally i think there was a lot of excitement about the internet as a force of political information that could be low cost, that could allow dissidents to find each other and mobilize and allow upstart candidates to avoid the big money raise and get their message out, i think what weve seen over the last number of years, theres a real dark side to politics on the internet. Internet companies, microtarget political advertising, which is a topic that i can talk about later if youre interested. They create filter bubbles. They create this atmosphere where counter speech cannot, because of the microtargeting, cannot really emerge. So, you get very narrowly targeted ads, directed at just a few and somebody else who might have different ideas doesnt see the same set of ads, they dont know that you need might want to provide you information to counter those arguments. At the internet and amplify political information and disinformation and we saw this coming from russia in the 2016 election, but what is kind of skir scary now were seeing some mimicking some of the soviet style campaigns. And i can imagine at ways of going against foreign interference, its harder from domestic sources. Theyre failing to adequately protect against foreign interference, at least at the point of 2016 where they were getting money for ads in rubles and didnt occur to them that that was a problem . Theyve caught that now and theyre not doing that anymore. The algorithms are designed to promote at all costs staying on the platform and theyve found that the best way of doing that is to keep people riled up. So the platforms, i think, are playing this really negative role in our civil discourse which is becoming, frankly, pretty uncivil. And they have a serious problem with inauthentic users and bots and theyve got kind of a whackamole approach that isnt really very effective. So we decided to follow the money on the way advertising is going on the internet. The reason that they are making all this money and theyre so effective is that they suck all of your personal data out of everything you do online. I mean, its really pretty scary, reading things like your flashlight is sending location data out and companies are marketing that. Who would think that your flashlight was collecting data on you . But because of section 230 theres this broad immunity because the platforms are not seen as the originators of the content. Theres been some pushback on that and there was one case where at least one judge was willing to say, you know, the way the platforms are packaging the information is something akin to a content provider that hasnt won over any thats an outlier decision of that one judge, the panel went the other way, but i think that that is it shows that people are thinking about it differently and really, what the platforms are doing, theyre not really operating like the phone company where theyre just transmitting information blindly to the pipes. Theyre taking an active role in selecting what youre going to see and personally, i would not be averse to seeing inroads on 230 on those grounds. However, we can get at it a different way by making them pay for information theyre stealing from all of us. A platform that was you know, started in a dorm room with a philosophy of move that and break things, seems to now that theyve broken things, their approach seems to be more like go slow and dont clean up your messes. So i think we need to be creative about how we go after these problems and one way would be to impose costs on the front end and reallocate the costs where they belong. I believe this information does belong to us and that if the platforms were forced to pay for the data that theyre taking from us, that that would create different kinds of incentives. Maybe they wouldnt have so much targeted advertising and in any event, we could reclaim something that belongs to us. So we are we think that this kind of follow the money approach might work and in addition, what were proposing is that there be kind of a surcharge of 5 which is described as a democracy dividend that could be used for things like funding public media, Fact Checkers, Public Campaign financing, other democracy enhancing approaches. And ive been told that that is the end of my presentation so i will stop there, but im happy to answer questions on any of that. Thank you, patrick. [applause] alex, could i borrow that clicker for the okay. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is patrick day, im a as mentioned im a senior policy counsel at klausware. I want to thank them for holding this timely discussion. Im here in a personal capacity though before i start to talk did voter privacy, i would be remiss if i didnt mention two programs that the cloud fare is information in terms of protecting for firewall protection and offering programs free of charge. There are now 174 domains with state and local government in 26 states using cloudfare Free Services under the program. And we launched a similar one for campaigns. I have nothing to do with those, im proud to be associated with them. If you want information let me know. I was National Security council for senator feinstein. Our committee was in the middle of inquiry into the Russian Election and i was the add to look into an analytics firms in the United States. Called Cambridge Analytica. And im sure everybody was familiar with this. This was the ceo looking for ukraine and trap politicians in a fake election in asia and stories that cambridge in an election in nigeria, used sensitive medical information and release it to the public in order to throw the election. That was interesting for our committee over time. Over time as we looked into the activities, i became much more interested in things they were doing in the open and voter data in the United States and how theyd come to occupy such a prominent role in u. S. Politics. Cambridge analytical worked in 44 races in 2014. 50 races in the United States in 2016 including on behalf of two of the Major Party Candidates for president. We could spend quite a bit of time talking about Cambridge Analytica, but i want to highlight three points i think are relative to our discussions today, particularly election in the data space. Over the course of our investigation two questions that i got requested most often, what is targeting and does it really work. So the targeting if youre not familiar with a term that was developed largely in the commercial sector for Online Advertising. The premise is that using your individual personality traits where i inferred from data gathered about you online through social media like facebook and measuring your openness, extroevert, and its likely to predict your behavior and alter that. The objective is to make you buy pants or shoes, et cetera. It has a different context in the electoral context. Three studies on the slide were referred to us by cambridge and i thought they stand for three important principles or things i wasnt aware of. The first is that private traits are predictable from your digital footprint. So, innocuous facebook activity like liking katy perry or the super bowl or sneakers from that information, youre revealing highly sensitive personal information about yourselves, calculated by algorithms. So, they found they could use facebook likes to accurately predict sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious views and personality traits as we discussed, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental, and information you may not be revealed publicly is new available through the algorithms. And the second piece, computers do a better job figuring this out than humans. And by facebook likes you they could determine your personality better than your spouse. And the third right, i have no additional comment on whether thats a valid measure or not. And the third piece where it hits home, digital mass persuasion. They found that by employing the psycho graphic techniques and a real world study of 3. 5 Million People and found by using individuals underlying psychological traits messaging them. 40 more clicks and 50 more purchases through the campaign. And ill just read one passage that they put on the front of report why it was important. Digital mass persuasion could be used to covertly exploit weaknesses in peoples character and persuade them to take against their own best interest, highlighting the need for policy intervention. The second point about Cambridge Analytica and i think the quote is there by the picture, and unfortunately, i wont do it in a sean connery impression, but we know a couple of things about Cambridge Analytica and the russian government. We know that the ceo was briefing individuals with russian intelligence on u. S. Voter targeted activities and data presumably the psychographic, and they same time russia was targeting u. S. Voters in the United States to engineer a specific electoral outcome and we also know that theyre doing it pretty much all over the world. The second piece is, which i think is interesting, though of a different flavor, 2019 report from oxford, the Computational Research project, they found evidence of organized social media manipulation to shape domestic Audience Perception in 70 countries in 2019, up from 2018 and 2017. The third point about Cambridge Analytica, this was mentioned before, they werent alone. Cambridge no longer exists, however, and i just took a quick collection of entities, im sure there are more, these are groups that either employ former Cambridge Analytica staff. Contracted with Cambridge Analytica in the United States on to similar clients. One of the conditions on the slide, i wont say which, reportedly is offering an app that was developed for a u. S. Politician to collect voter data in Eastern Ukraine on behalf of a russianleaning ukrainian candidate. And if you know which one. The policy response, it created the detail that i relayed to you, created a pretty compelling reason for senator feinstein to introduce legislation which she did. She introduced the so i havent done power point presentations in a number of years and i was under the impression that that was part of this pres