To City Lights Book publishers. We are thrilled to have Samuel Woolley with us celebrating a very important book called the reality game how the next wave of technology will break the truth. It is from our friends at Public Affairs books. Samuel woolley is a writer and researcher specializing in the study of ai, emergent technology, politics, persuasion and social media, assistant professor of the school of journalism and Program Director for Computational Propaganda Research at the center for media engagement at the university of texas at austin. Samuel woolley founded and directed the Digital Intelligence lab at the institute of the future, 50yearold think tank based in the heart of Silicon Valley and cofounded and directed the Research Team at the computational propaganda project at Oxford Internet institute at the university of oxford. He has written on political manipulation of technology for a variety of publications including wired, the atlantic monthly, tech crunch, the guardian, and many others, his research has been featured in the new york times, washington post, wall street journal, also made appearances on the today show, 60 minutes and frontline. His work has been presented to members of nato, the u. S. Congress in the uk parliament. It is an honor to have him with us tonight doing this important research. Please give him a warm welcome. [applause] hi, everyone, great to be here. Hearing my bio it sounds kind of fake. It has been a wild ride. Im really happy to end in san francisco, specifically at city lights. Thank you for having me. I couldnt think of a better place to end this tour. To talk about a book on democracy at the end of the day in the ways we reimagine and rebuild technology in a technological age. A lot of people assume when they talk to me about my work that i am a Computer Scientist and that is not true. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a long time i thought maybe i should try to play the game and say i took a few classes, i know a little bit about html but at the end of the day im the kind of person that studies what i study by talking to people. I spend time in places, spend time with people and i go deep and go deep on subjects and so for the better part of the last decade i have been going deep on the subject of computational propaganda. It is a fancy term for the ways in which automation and computer codes, algorithms and things like that get used to manipulate Public Opinion. What weve seen in the last four or five years during the brexit referendum, in india with recent problems caused by whats apps, offline violence, weve seen social media become used as a tool for manipulation and disinformation. A lot has changed. We had up perspective that social media was going to be something that would be the savior of democracy. That is shown through googles phrase do no evil and also showcased by work about digital utopia and cyber libertarianism. That is not where we are now but we are not lost. Everything is not lost yet and this is not just a book about how screwed up everything is and how scary the world is. It is a book about solutions. Every chapter ends with a solution, the conclusion is a Solutions Oriented chapter and after spending nearly a decade working on this i realized there are a lot of things we can do. I will end on those things. Lets talk about storytelling and what it means to be an ethnographer, somebody who studies technology by talking to the people who make and build technology. I will introduce you to four people, four places and four ideas i learned in the last several years. These four people, places and ideas have been instrumental in how i wrote this book and been thinking about technology. The first person is named phil, my advisor who the book is dedicated to, my phd advisor and director of the Oxford Internet institute at the university of oxford and phil took me under his wing when i did my phd at the university of washington seattle. Phil at the time had been studying the arab spring. He had been in tunisia, in tunis studying people using technology to communicate about democracy, to organize protests. He had written the book with oxford press called the digital origins of dictatorship and democracy and discussion in this book was about the ways the internet played a role from the beginning of the internet going public in countries first facilitating dictatorship and democracy for helping people to realize freedom, to realize control. Phil was talking about these things very early on and i had just come from being a fellow on the Obama Campaign in 2012 and become enthralled when i was working on a campaign, the way they were making use of data. I was blown away by how sophisticated the campaign was. And the storytelling aspects. And the Obama Campaign on the side of the voters. And the massive amounts of data with personal stories and humanizing the data, to reach people in the resounding message of what is hope. When i met phil, phil taught me something important, something that bears saying to all of you which is technology and Politics Today are inherently connected. You cant have one without the other and to some extent if you think of technology is simply tools, media and the way media is used to community with people about information on behalf of others this is always been the case but in todays World Technology and politics are very much intertwined. The campaigns that do the best around the world these days are the campaigns that have the most technological savvy. The reality, not to overuse the phrase on the front cover but the reality is if you have a lot of data, if you can marry it to a sophisticated ai system you can do specific targeting to people and speak to them in a way they would like to be spoken to. So phil, in seattle, university of washington taught me that people and technology are intertwined. The next person i want to introduce you to is a person named andrew. I met andrew in england and took a position at the university of oxford. I got grant money to study computational propaganda in 2013 and the European Research council and they wanted to know how russia and other countries were using social media to influence Public Opinion. Do you want to come to oxford, i was in oxford with you. At a conference, standing around, still am scared about it. Conspiracy theorist often wants to talk to you. When random people approach me and know who i am, are we going to talk about aliens or flat earth or antivaccine stuff and am i going to have to carry on with you . The fact is i dont know how to talk to you about that stuff. I actually make and build automated profile on social media for the labour party in england. On behalf of the labour party they dont pay me to do anything about it. Lets talk, strike an unlikely friendship, the ways in which people can use to amplify voices online. The use of campaigns to look like people are profiles, they arent people, they are automated profiles. They can use these accounts to retweet messages, the evolution of Machine Learning, ai, to talk to people in more sophisticated fashion. The technology doesnt exist on its own. Social media firms would have you believe the algorithms are apolitical, dont have value or make decisions in a way no one could have figured out or decided upon, and in new england, something called social media collective does fantastic open work. The algorithms and software always have human value in them. If you train a Machine Learning tool and what you have to do is go through a process of tagging the data and you have people do that. If all the people who tag the data are white men, then the algorithm ends up being privatizing were bus lines go in a certain neighborhood, turned out to be racist. Suddenly poor neighborhoods or neighborhoods of color, where the bus goes, places that need free passes for the bus and up not getting as much bus is coming through and that is a tool encoded with human values. Bots are the same thing. You amplify information, use social media to be late Public Opinion, when social Media Companies to prioritize certain information there is politics a, decisions that go into the process, if i had a dollar for every time i heard social Media Company say we are not the arbiters of truth i would have 10, 000 because they dont want you to think they arbitrate truth but im here to tell you that is not the case. Trending algorithms that prioritize information that people curate information or prioritize the things you see. The longest time and even today organizations like google, facebook and twitter made decisions about how to prioritize news to people. That matters. This book is about that. Andrew taught me you need to look at the person behind the tool. It is not enough to do quantitative research, to download a ton of data, do the Data Analysis but all know about what they are building, why they are building it and who they are doing it for. You might think if savvy political campaigns are doing this work, turns out when you dig down deep you find shadow we pr firms, market organizations that say i can build a social media profile and add 10,000 accounts in the next few weeks and surprise surprise what they are using his fake profiles, fake information and it is a weird world out there. The third person i want to introduce you to is a woman named marina who was my boss at the institute for the future. I met marina after trump won the 2016 election, first time i had been to the institute of the future in palo alto and they flew me out for a roundtable with a bunch of Research Scientists and politicians from the state department who are concerned with the weaponization of ai. At the time, ai hadnt been weapon eyes the way people thought it had. There were not smart ai bots talking to people to change their mind about politics but more ai was used by the algorithm, manipulating Public Opinion but marina listened to all the experts speak at very astutely in her way said at the end talk, this is a continuation of kgb tactics, she grew up in ukraine during the firm of the soviet union and she said what we need to think about isnt we dont need to think this propaganda is new because it is not new, tactics are new. Things we are seeing our continuations of things we have seen for a long time. It is the technology and the way the technology has been leveraged that is making this more potent. We see automation and anonymity. Epidemic in this country and the term fakeness has been a weaponize by people who spread fake news. I challenge you from here on out if you want to know how you can be part of the problem is misinformation at which means accidentally spread or dis information which is purposely spread false information you could say mall information which means bad, stupid stuff. Junk news. The terminology matters, history matters, and its no surprise to me, the returns that have studied this stuff she wrote a great piece called the lexicon of lies, all about the ways we talk about propaganda, its no surprise that people who spread these lies are taking on own terminology in making the same exact arguments about when you point they figured them there saying no you are doing this. Thats exactly the playbook. The playbook is not necessarily dips lay can change peoples minds is to create confusion and apathy. Its to make people mad and polarized. Thats what we miss a lot of the time we think their sophistication in the sense that theyre coming and talking to us in making is interested in owning a gun, thus no other doing there they are to make you not want to vote, not to engage in democracy, to think the system is broken you are so angry that use vote to so many speaks to your anger versus someone who access policies. So we got a look at history. Marina is actually right that this comes out of the soviet playbook. One thing you should also know is the russians are the only ones who do oppositional propaganda. Think it benefits a lot that they are the owens you propagation all that talk about its the thing that only happens to them parent competition all propaganda is informational happens in nearly every country around the world. There is a reporter my ultimate oxford that suggests during elections and over 70 or 80 countries 70 or 80 country cimmaron that ballpark, this has been a weaponize by governments and campaigns. It also happens domestically, domestic actors do this is fitted almost anyone can do at this date in effect my next book its going to be from your scholar read this with even more boring. [laughter] manufacturing consensus its a riff on trumps consent in the book behind that book so we use these to create the illusion of popularity the more you make it look popular the more it seems like a viable idea. Okay one person the last place less idea. The last person to scaffolding, she is my boss out the university of boston shes formally of the near time she was a dining editor and before that she was a sports reporter. I dont how you make that transition left as kathleen. She is fantastic. What i went to ut, i had kind of lost a little bit of hope because of everything that is going on, because i had been writing this book and thinking about the ways in which the informational system is broken. But it work at the school of journalism at ut. And kathleen is the director. Kathleen has taught me that we need to place faith in the institutions we arty have. We dont need to create brandnew things. We have the federal Elections Committee get the federal Communications Commission we dont need a federal disinformation commission we dont need one more thing to do that in washington. More specifically we need to invest in journalism. Journalism in this country has done amazing things. There are so many people that work for great publications around the United States that what to do good work and want to protect democracy. They are still having to learn on the fly in fact in the book i talk a lot about the ways in which journalism has not just been challenged by the digital era its not like they are individuals or organizations that cant handle the digital era its organization like google, google news, youtube, facebook, twitter massively benefit off the work of journalists that giving any renumeration or money to these folks pray the same can be said like wikipedia, when youtube faced the crisis of disinformation what to do . It started leaking wikipedia articles with a name talk to wikipedia which is a nonprofit et cetera nonprofit and youtube is using it as the resource that youtube sent people to with this information. Same thing goes for journalists. Google news for the longest time gives snippets of articles among people started researching it, you couldnt click through to the actual article youll had snippets. We click the actual article, or the Research Showed that no one actually read the full article. No one actually clicked through they just read the little piece until the journalists put all the work into during this investigation, writing the whole article, google post the article, snippet, nobody actually reads it. And we wonder why the news industry is failing, whites having a hard time worried maybe failing a death wrong word. What i think as we can reinvigorate journalism and not let the cat out of the bag too much amidst exactly my argument is. The argument is that the Technology Firms around the country, should have to put i dont know 10 billion or 20 billion into it public trust in the United States and let that be overseen by some Society Groups people have a stake in making sure the money is spent wisely and well. Google news labs has committed three hunter 50 million or so to the google news initiative. Google gives out that money they make partnerships with organizations, they make decisions about who gets it and who doesnt. For a long time ago has done when they have experienced a backlash about the policies of the algorithms not prioritizing full articles, they have deep prioritize the new sites that have complained. And so that is not good enough. The Technology Companies have helped create this problem and they have admitted to it. Theres a big mia coppola mogul it was on Mark Zuckerberg saying before congress he did some bad stuff, they have a hand in that thats kind of our fault, but that went really given back. They havent systematized this problem. Theyve done some things, and they have been working hard in many ways. But its not enough. Its really important that we remember these are multibilliondollar companies. Some of the Richest Companies in the world. They get treated more like nationstates these days and they get treated like a regular company. So, kathleen taught me to it reinvest in journalism and to be skeptical of what we see today. And to not think, like i said earlier that journalism has failed theres a lot there. With all these things in mind, all these things taken together, live a really interesting picture. And we have this book. This book is actually book about the future. I talk about what weve been through but this looks to the next wave of technology its about fake videos its about a ites but Virtual Reality its about automated voice systems like just like a person like google duplex and it thanks a lot about the ways in which these next wave of technology will make way for more disinformation. The subtitle is provocative for recent supposed to scare people best Case Scenario you will prove me long you will not let Technology Break the truth this is must be a warning at a provocation. And bergen into reading them organ a