Want to looking all to city lights. We are thrilled to have Samuel Woolley with us here tonight celebrating a very, very important new book called the reality game how the next wave of technology will break the truth. It is from our friends at Public Affairs book. He is a a writer and researcher specializing in the study of ai, emergent technology, politics, persuasion and social media. Hes an assistant professor in the school of journalism and Program Director for competition all Propaganda Research of the center for media engagement of university of texas at austin. Dr. Woolley founded and directed the Digital Intelligence lab at the institute for the future which is a 50yearold think tank based in the heart of silicon valley. He also cofounded and directed the Research Team at computational propaganda project at Oxford Internet institute at the university of oxford. He has written on political manipulation of technology or a variety of publications. These include wired, the atlantic monthly, vice, tech crunch, the guardian, and many, many others. His research has been featured in publications such as the new york times, the washington post, the wall street journal. Hes also made appearances on the today show, 60 minutes, and frontline. His work is been present a risk of nato, the u. S. Congress and the uk parliament. It is such great honor to having you with us tonight doing this incredible an important research. Please give him a warm welcome. [applause] hi, everyone. Great to be here. When i get my fire up that sounds kind of thing. Its been a ride. This is last talked up by two or and will happen to be here in san francisco. Specifically her at city lights. Thank you to everyone here at the store for having me. I couldnt think of a better place to in the tour and talk about really what is a book on democracy at the end of it and the ways in which we reimagine and rebuild democracy in the technological age. A lot of people assume with the talking about my work that im a Computer Scientist thats actually not true. Nothing could be further from the truth or for a long thought maybe i should try to play the game and be like that, i took a few classes, i knew a little bit, but at the end of the day im the kind of person that studies what i study the talking to people. Im an ethnographer. I spent time in places, spent time with people and i go deep. I good deep on subjects. For the better part of elastic and ive been going deep on the subject of what i call competition propaganda. Its a fancy term for the ways in which automation and computer algorithm Something Like that get used to make of Public Opinion. What we think in the last four or five years, 2016 during use election, during the brexit referent, in myanmar with the massacre in india with recent problems caused by arguably by whatsapp that afflict offline violence, weve seen social media become used as a tool for manipulation as a tool for this information. A lot has changed. In the early 2000 we had a perspective, perspective that social media was going to be something that would be the sake of democracy in many ways. That was best shown through googles kind of talking phrase of you know evil, and it was also showcased by a lot of the work that came out of the time talk about digital utopia and cyber libertarianism. Thats not where we are now, but were not lost. Everything is not lost yet and this book is not just a book about how screwed up everything is and how scary the world is. Its a book about solutions. Everything will chapter ends with solutions. The conclusion is a Solutions Oriented chapter and after spending a decade working on this i realized there are a lot of things we can do. I will end the talk today on those things. First lets talk about storytelling and what it means to be an ethnographer and some who studies technology by talking to people who make intel technology. Tonight, im going to introdue you to four people, for places and for ideas that i learned in the last several ideas. These four people, places and ideas have been instrumental and how i wrote this book and how ive been thinking about technology. The first person is named phil and hes my advisor. He is who the book is dedicated to. Hes got the director of the Internet Institute at the University Box appeared he took me under his wings. Philip at the time had been studying the arab spring. He had been in tunisia, studying the people who are using technology and attempted to make it about democracy to organize contests, to do all the sorts of things. He had written a book with oxford press called the digital origins of dictatorship and democracy. The discussion in this book was all about the ways in which the internet has have played a rolm the beginning of the internet going public in conscious both facilitate dictatorship and also facilitating democracy, for helping people to realize freedom but also dropping people to realize control. Phil was thinking about these kinds of things very early on. I had just come from being a fellow on the Obama Campaign in 2012 and i become enthralled what is working on the campaign with the way they were making use of data. I was like blown away by how sophisticated the Data Campaign was. There was a lot of excitement about Community Organizing aspects of the campaign and the personal storytelling aspects none of that wouldve been anything without the connection to the data the Obama Campaign had on independent or undecided voters. What he did, what they married the data, massive amounts of data in a massive amount of work with personal stories and humanizing from the date the way that was able to really reach people. When i met phil come he taught me something really was important and do something i attended known but really they were saying to all of you, which was technology and Politics Today are inherently connected. You cant have one without the other. To some extent if you think of technology is simply tools, if we think about media and the waste meeting gets used to communicate with people or to people about information on behalf of others, then this is often the case but in todays World Technology and politics are very much intertwined. The campaigns that tend to do the best around the world these days are the campaigns that have the most technological savvy because the reality is, not to overuse the phrase on the front cover but the reality is that if you have a lot of data and if you can marry to sophisticated ai system then you can do very goodspecific individualized at targeting or targeted to people that speak to them in the way they would like to be spoken to. Thats something we realize no. So phil in Seattle University of washington taught me that people and technology are intertwined. The the next person want to introduce you to is a person named andrew and i met andrew in england when i taken a job at the university of oxford but ended up happening we got grant money to study competition propaganda in about 2013 from the National Condition of use and European Council falsehood. They wanted to how russian of the country using social media to try to influence Public Opinion in democracies. Phil got offered a job at oxford and he said to want to come to archer whitney . Yeah, twist my arm. Of course want to come to oxford with you. I ended up there and when did i set a conference actually lsd and understanding around didnt know anyone, was young, kind of scared about it, still them, and this guy approaches me and when you study propaganda although its a conspiracy theorist to talk to. When ray and people approach me also bit like im going to startaliens or flat earth or antivaccine stuff . Amalie going to have to carry on with you . The fact of medicine i dont know how to talk to about that stuff. But andrew said hey, i make them build automated profiles on social media for a labour party in england. What . Yeah, like i control several hundred or thousand of the Council Twitter i do it on that of the labour party. Im doing it because unlike a member and a believe believe in it and stuff. I said wow visit pretty crazy. Lets talk. Got to talking and stuck up an unlikely friendship, and he really taught me a lot about the ways in which people can use technology to amplify the voices online. A lot of what i talk with in this book is a social media box, the use of campaigns built to look like people site, profiles built to look like people in social media but that are not people. They are automated profiles. One person can manage many, many, many accounts online. You can use this account to drive up likes, to retweet messages, you can also use thm now with the evolution of Machine Learning and ai to talk to people any more sophisticated fashion. Andrew taught me theres always, always a person behind the technology. The technology doesnt exist on its own. Social media firms today would have you believe the algorithms are apolitical, that they dont have value, that they make decisions in a way that no one could if they could have decided upon. If you follow the work of people like Microsoft Research new england with something called social media collective at the some fantastic openwork, surprising thing for microsoft on this, you will know that algorithms and software and technology always have human value in them. The people who built these things encode them with their own beliefs. For instance, if you train a Machine Learning tool and what you have to do is go through a process that tagging the data and your people do that. If all the people that tag the data are white men, then the algorithm may end up being racist especially if its prioritizing what bus lines should go insert neighborhood, hypothetically. Suddenly the poor neighborhoods of the neighborhoods of color, stop getting bus lines. When the bus goes, the places that need free passes for the bus end up not getting as much bus is coming through. That is an algorithm for tool encoded with human values. Bots are the same thing. When you build bots to have information, when you social be an attempt to manipulate Public Opinion, when social Media Companies build algorithms that prioritize information, theres politics there. There are decisions that go into that process. If i had adult fruit about social Media Company say were not the arbiters of truth, i would have 10,000 because they dont want you to think that arbitrate truth. Im here to tell you today thats not the case. Trending algorithms that prioritize information to people share information, they prioritize the things that you see. For the longest time and even today organizations like google, facebook, twitter and make decisions about how to prioritize news to people. Think about that. That matters and this book is about that. Andrew taught me you will need to look at the person behind the tool. Its not enough for us to do one of the Research Download data and say we will do they data now, why duplicate and who theyre doing it for. You might think its savvy lyrical campaigns that are doing this work but it turns out we could dig down deep you start finding like shadowy pr firms and marketing organizations that say i can build you social media profile and at 10,000 account in the next few weeks and surprise, surprise what theyre using is fake profiles in fake information. Its a whole weird world out there. The third person i want to introduce you to is a woman named marina. She was my boss at the institute for the future and i met her a day or two days after trump won the 2016 election. It was the first time i had ever been at the institute of the future edits in palo alto and the food out for a roundtable with a bunch of Research Scientist and a bunch of politicians at the state department were really concerned with weaponization of ai. At the time that i had that in weaponized invoice thought had come there were not smart bots talk to people and consenting to change her mind about politics. It was more a either juice behind algorithms have been more subtly integrated Public Opinion. But marina listen to all of the experts speak and then astutely in her way said at the end of the talk this is all continuation of kgb tactics and russian stuff. Shes ukraine. She grew up in ukraine in the former soviet union and she said maybe what we need to think about is a, we dont need to think this propaganda is good because this is not new. The tactics are not new. The things were seeing our continuation. Its the technology and with the technology is being leveraged thus making this so much more potent. You see automation, anonymity, we see things go the problems of scale parallel application, quantum computing, all of issues are things we need to be considering. While we consider the we have the considering the way the people who are behind them are using them. Marina copy we need to look at history. Read to think that what propaganda has been used in the past and have a deep understanding of not just with the public issues but also the terminology we use. What we say matters. Right now theres a sort of epidemic in this country of using the term fake news. The term fake news has been weaponized by people that spread fake news. I challenge you if you want to ask you what you do as an individual not to be part of the problem, that use the term is the use of the term misinformation which means accidentally spread false information or disinformation which means purposefully spread false information to it want to be fancy, you can send out information which is bad, stupid stuff. Junk news. And so the terminology matters, History Matters and its no surprise to me or the researchers tested stuff like this, carolyn jack who wrote a great piece called the lexicon of lies all about the ways without propaganda, its no spice of people who spread these lies are taken on the terminology make the same exact arguments about when to put the vigor and vim its a you doing this, this, they say no commuting district thats the playbook. The playbook isnt to change peoples might it to create confusion. Its to generate apathy. Its to make people mad and polarized. Thats the thing we miss a lot of the type we think theres sophistication in the sense that these bots are coming to talk to us and they guess suddenly become interested in owning a gun. Thats not what theyre doing. The bots are there to make you not want to vote. Not want to engage in democracy, to think the system is broken so youre so angry you for someone whos picture anchor rather than someone who has policies. We had have to look at historyd marina is right at the step comes under the soviet playbook but one thing you all should note is the russians about the only people that do confrontational propaganda. And, in fact, i think the russians benefit a lot from us thinking there really people do propagation propaganda from us talking about all the South Pacific to think that only happens from them. Computational propaganda and will recall Information Operations happened early in every country around the world these days. Theres a great reporter from an old team at oxford that suggests during elections in over 70 or 80 countries, this stuff has been weaponized by governments and by campaigns. It also happens domestically. There is bent democratization of competition propaganda, almost anyone can do it these days. My next book that will be coming out with joe press is more scholarly so it would probably be even more boring but my next book is called manufacturing consensus, and the idea behind the book is that we use this technology to create the illusion of popular for things. At the more you something look popular, the more you make it seem like a viable idea. Okay, one more person. The last person, the last place in the last idea. The last person is kathleen, by boston at the university of austin. She was formerly at the new york times, and before that she is a sports reporter. I dont know how you make that transition like that, kathleen. But shes fantastic. And when he went to ug i cant lost a little bit of hope because ut. Guess of the writing this damn book and spend time spending ways but how the weight Information System is broken. I worked in the school of journalism at ut and kathleen is director. Kathleen has taught me that we need to place space and institutions where we have. We dont need to create brandnew things. We have the federal election commission, the federal Communication Commission so we dont need the federal disinformation commission. We dont need one more commission. But more specifically we need to invest in the journalism. Journalism in this country has done amazing things. Theres so many people that work for great publications around the United States that what to do good work and want to protect democracy. They still have to learn on the fly. In fact, in the book i talk about the ways in which journalism has been not just challenged by the digital era, its not like there are feckless individuals or orcs which that cant handle it. Organizations like google, google news, youtube, facebook, twitter massively benefit on the work of journalists without giving any renumeration or money to the sites. The same can be said for organizations like wikipedia. When you to face the crisis of disinformation what did it do quick it started linking wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is not profit one of the five most access site on the web but a nonprofit and youtube is using it as the resource that you get some people to when you thought there was this information. Same thing for travelers. Google news for the longest time take snippets of articles and with people