Womens executive director of the Georgia Institute for a law in policy, its a think they tank based here in the law school where we do original policy work inflammation with her faculty and students and also spend a lot of time thinking about how we train lawyers and posing makers to better understand the many Ways Technology is impacting our society. There is no more pressing instances of that issue than the topic of the symposium today, Election Integrity and the networked in formation era, technology is reshaping many facets of our society including changing the venues, scope and toe of information sharing and the conversations. How these changes radar elections is a priority of the higher order, so the elections of the institutions and an area where arguably above all others we need public trust. There is no question the public trust and Democratic Institutions is being challenged in seismic race today, so that is to say we have a lot to talk about, there youre gonna hear about a wiper that matchup is purely technical, we strive to break out of tech traditional silos to bring things to bear on major social issues of our time. We are approaching these questions through four different lenses in our program today. Looking at questions of information sharing and public discourse, a significant risks of voter oppression and turnouts, Election Security and lastly a specific conversation on policy solutions. During the lunch break, we will have student presentations, posters at the back of the room reflecting some of the thoughtful scholarships that georgetown students are doing in this area. Much of the work presented today will be published in the Georgetown Law Technology review, student journal and we are very grateful to this years editor, josh banker into the full Journal Staff for their Work Together. Im going to save the significant things that is owned to other folks until later in the day given the time. You will see some of them floating in the room over the course of the day today. He immediately im going to pass it over to josh to welcome you and we will start with the program. Thank you. applause good morning everyone. My name is josh bank your on behalf of the george law review, welcome today symposium about Election Integrity and the Network Information era. Before i begin i want to say two things, first thank you all for coming and thank you to our wonderful guests for showing up today. I want to extend a quick thanks to the george town Faculty Administration whose without the support none of this would be possible. Second, i want to say how proud i am of the Georgetown Law Technology review or glitter as it is affectionately referred to by the staff. We are a student run law review focus on the intersection of lawn technology. We need to facilitate a conversation about the heart of questions faced by legal scholars, technologists and policy makers. Just our past issue we covered online manipulation, the regulation of mobile health data, how to solve the global last mile problem for broadband aspect, both a constitutional and international perspective, deepfakes on their impact on the news, robot Corporate Board members, the committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the inner workings of a smattering of different technologies that impact their daily lives. During his four years of existence it has salvaged itself for a place of ideas and we should be proud of the legacy. Todays fits neatly into that tradition and we are incredibly excited about it in the day ahead between the wonderful speakers we have in the students that are going to be with us today to present their posters. I think we have a vent that is going to speak to the issues we have seen throughout the past week. I look forward to hearing from everyone today, i know the journal is looking to see each speaker capture the ideas they discussed today and bring it forward to publication later this spring. I encourage you all to look for to the publication and future issues of the Georgetown Law Technology review. Thank you all again for coming and i hope you continue to look towards us. Without further ado, id like to tune over to professor airing to start our first panel this. Thanks josh and thanks to all of you for being here today. We are really grateful. I am glad to have this panel on Network Information and college being the first of the day. I think it was aptly named to julie cohen for that. I see it as establishing about terrain or landscape that underlies what we are going to talk about for the rest of the day. I want to provide a kind of warning along those lines. The terrain is rough, this week our panelists Whitney Phillips had a piece in why youre entitled the internet is a toxic helps cape. That gives you an idea to the depth which we are going to travel. I think the sub head was that we can fix it. I dont want to over promise but in addition to spending some time serving the health escape, i think we are also going to be offered some frames, some metaphors and some possibilities for thinking about making that landscape a little less and may be thinking about what it actually means to us. You have the programs the biles of the Foreign Press of people you have here in front of you. What id like to do in introducing them rather than repeat that information is to tell you a few more personal words as to why i am grateful that each of them were able to join us today. Im going to unfairly asked them to cabin all of the good things they have to say in about 12 minutes apiece. After that, im going to ask them a question or two and im going to open it up to all of you to ask them questions for at least 20 minutes or more but. Feel free to be jotting things down or thinking as they are speaking. First to my left we have mike who is an associate professor of communications in journalism at ufc. He is one of the foremost communication scholars thinking about the network here and the press is role in it. What i love about mics work and what my students have appreciated when i sign it is the way that he pushes us to think about what we want our relationships to look at, what we want our democracy to look like, what we want our publics to look like, when we want our press to look like and consider what the preconditions are for us to get there. Then we have laetitia pony who is a Leading Light on georgetowns main campus where hes the distinguished professor in the Communications Culture and technology program. She has done some interesting work as to how we get political information online, how social media becomes a space where we create our political cells and how we might minimize the misinformation that we find there. Then we have Whitney Phillips, who is an associate professor in the department of communications and rhetorical studies at syracuse. When he has been really entrenched and thinking about information disorder and polluted information for many years and has done vital work in getting journalists to how clearly they see to polluting and giving them practical tools to addressing it. I find her use of ecological metaphors to be really powerful in helping me think through exactly what problems we are facing and how they operate. Finally, we have a Senior Reporter at Buzzfeed News. She has made it her job to understand how the social web works and how to help her readers and other journalists understand it better. She is the leader in using data to do journalism and she really wields her power to make journalism more impactful, more diverse and more responsive to its audience. With that i want to handed over to mike to get a started. Thank you very much aaron, that was the kind of, generous, most detailed interaction i have ever had. I really appreciate it. Thanks to julie, you and josh in the whole team at george town for being here. It is a total treat. What i want to do today as someone who is coming from this question that erin carroll headlined as a Commission Communication scholar and spends a lot of time with journalists, i want to tell you the story of a study that i did thinking about the intersection between platforms and journalists and offered three ways to think about this terrain that erin carroll described. Three ways to think about what speeches platforms do and what they are emerging between the news and journalism sorry news and platform. Im taking a take on ian hacking, a famous philosopher of knowledge and had this essay called, making up people and his argument was to say a lot of the ways we think about describing people, the way we think about who they are, putting them in the category and boxes is an act of making them up. It is an act of constructing them, an active thinking about what parts of them are going to parentage into an opportunity to. What i want to argue is that a lot of the language, infrastructure of contemporary platforms is about making a political people. It is about deciding what kinds of politics people get to have, what kind of Political Action they get to do. I want to unpack that a little bit. I come to this question with sort of two questions, what assumptions the platforms make about speech when they cast people as users . We are trying to convert people in a way or think about them as users of systems, not necessarily as political agents. Could these assumptions that the platforms are making be new sites of governance . I think we are in a moment where we are struggling to see what it means and what that might look like. We are struggling for an away is engagement moments, ways to sort of understand our pressure points, understand the opportunities for governance that might exist. What i do, this is sort of compressing a lot of science and technology studies, is that i try and think about can this concept of infrastructure be a concept that we can think about and use or deploy against his question a platform governance. If we see platforms of infrastructure, what opportunities might that give us to think about regulating platforms in different ways, to think about tracing the public dimensions and public tensions of platforms. I think infrastructure sort of one of these concepts that i want to deploy. What i mean by infrastructure . They define infrastructure and a few different ways, one is this sort of largely in invisible infrastructure works best when it is sort of in the background, when we do not notice it. It is these conditions for shared meaning. It is the rules, assumptions, values, language that go into figuring out how we think together, how we assume together. Infrastructures tend to work when the outcomes are predictable, when we know something is going to behave and when the systems stay invisible. We should not see infrastructure if infrastructure is properly configured and properly deployed. They also tend to be built on what they call staple bases, ideological bases, you should not be questioning things, you should not be revisiting assumptions, we should be thinking about the act of maintaining the infrastructure, but do not question the basis underlying them. Finally it is maintained through boundary work and that is sort of a fancywork for saying there is an infrastructure one professionals of different backgrounds, different ideologies, different languages are coming together and trying to sustain something. I think in a lot of ways our platforms meet a lot of these criteria is and they are sort of these invisible systems. We dont yet know what it means to exactly say they broken down, we dont know exactly to say when they are working. I want to offer that as a way of thinking about it. To get a little bit more grounded in concrete, when i want to offer you as a story about a study i did, this was wrapped up and finished in january of 2018, february 2018. It was focused on this Fact Checking network that facebook has with five u. S. News. It has since changed a lot if you have been following this. I do not claim to be talking about the contemporary or current configuration of this but this is a snapshot in time of a parade particular regiment of a News Organization. What i want to do is sort of use this as infrastructure to think with about what kinds of regulatory opportunities might exist. Just to give you a little bit of a background, this partnership was formed immediately after the 2016 u. S. President ial elections. You are probably very aware that facebook was under pressure to do something about this from an ominous on of fake news. What that was and how much they were responsible for that phenomenon or not continue to be very much in question. What i want to drill down and focus on is every particular work floor that the partnership established. This work for centered around a dashboard and dashboard for Science Technologies wants to study the boring thing, they want to study the thing that is not very interesting. Dashboards to me are fascinating, even though they look boring. This dashboard is a place where facebook identified stories that they thought were potentially false. That checkers and use organizations would go to that dashboard, pick stories off it and to the Fact Checking work and they would then put it back into the system, facebook would sort of suck it up back into the system, learn some patterns, to some magic that they were not willing to talk about and then it would impact how speech circulated on their platform. This dashboard was sort of this boundary moment, it was a place where facebook engineers, free speech regulars and journalists and Fact Checkers also to have figure out how should we would Work Together and we think of the circulation of speech on this platform. What i want to think about is how this is an infrastructure of free speech. How this is a arrangement between these organizations that work through a social technical process, that works through this dashboard that either works or doesnt work . A dash for that none of us have seen that is largely invisible but that is incredibly powerful for thinking about how speak circulates. What assumption does this infrastructure make . Are the elements of this infrastructure, this dashboard something that we can used to think about governance . I want to have you three ways with time i have left to think about what this infrastructure has taught us about speech governance. I am offering these three ways to sort of potential opportunities or potential objects of focus for us to think about what would it mean to regulate a Partnership Like that . That had that kind of impact. I will go through them individually but maybe in the questions and answers we can talk more about them. First about them is the dashboard would assume. Sort of this information idealism isnt ship. There is a particular kind of public to this judge supporters meant to serve. Facebook to the Fact Checkers had the raw goods that the Fact Checkers needed. They had the misinformation, the things potentially wrong. Facebook talked about the Community Coming through to truthful reporting and if people could decide what to trust and share. It is very much this information centered model of what good public life look like. Fact checkers also disagreed on whether to sequester misinformation, whether it should be put on a separate area that was labeled at such so people can still see information but not engage with it directly. Whether you should juxtapose cleansing should evaluating completing claims and certainly serve a marketplace bottle of speech. Almost no support for actually removing the misinformation entirely. Fact checkers, when i did interviews with them, they said that was a bridge too far. We are going to make strong to determinations on what is false or true but it is not for us to decide the circulation of that information. Even amongst people who are heavily invested in making strong claims that a truthful can impact. There was a strong resistance to sort of limiting the circulation of the speech that they had to decide was not necessarily meaningful. She had confusion as to what to do with emotions. This idea that people share things because they are passion about them and invest in about them. Honestly the Fact Checkers white top two on facebook have very thin ways as to understanding what that may have been. Secondly i want to talk about is there is this idea on relying on categories, this idea that categories instabilities of categories are the things the foundation of this infrastructure that needed work. I want to talk about categories in a few different ways. The forces that facebook was essentially outsourcing the construction of true and falls to a set of professionals, the Fact Checkers can point to and say that is where the determination and false city lies we need those categories to be stapled. We dont want factors to second casing themselves, wanting to be quite declarative been quite strong. I wont go through all of these but facebook defines popularity against popularity that checkers were lets hear some folks. What does popularity mean, we do not know what the mechanism we are not seeing major conspiracy theories or conservative media. No info, that is a surprise. Some sources are not defined as popular because a fact checker surmise maybe sometimes false or fake news makes money so will not be listed as one of the popular stories. They also want to facebook to define popular for them to help them organize their work. One of them said, you do not want to write about something that has not gone viral because you dont want to elevate its visibility. They spoke often had these interchangeable words analysis in the policy. They talked about fox news, misinformation, fake stories in th