Political advertisements. Georgetowns Law Institute hosted this forum. Okay. So were reconvening for our fourth and final panel of the day. New challenges in election oversight and regulation. For those who didnt see me at the top of the day, im alexangra gibbons. I run ouw institute for Technology Law and policy here at the law school and were really thrilled to be hosting you all today. The conversation so far have surfaced many key areas of challenges. Somebody was saying that theyre feeling a little depressed and we need to try to get the energy up on the final panel of the day. Issues from the fragmentation of political discourse and new pathways for misinformation to voter suppression, to the technical challenges of election security. This panel is going to add another challenge the significant challenges we face in election oversight and preparedness. But also talk about the solution 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 who is the federal election commissioner. She has served as a commissioner on the fec since 2002 and previous worked in the Political Law Group and is a counsel to the house ethics committee. Next to her is patrick day. He previously served as the longtime staffer in the senate where we were colleagues working as the National Security council for senator dianne feinstein. The former ambassador to the organization for Economic Cooperation and delegate is at the german marshal fund. And finally at the end is Mark Lawrence appelbaum, a georgetown law graduate who completed a project at the legal center on foreign election interference and on line disinformation threats in u. S. Elections. Were going to follow the same procedures that we have in previous panels. Commissioner weintraub is going to begin and we will move down. Thank you for inviting me. Asked to speak about nww challenges in ten minutes or less is a bit of a challenge as well. Im going to hit on a bit of the challenges that im personally confronting at the fec 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. So thank you for helping me get all that together. Without his efforts, georgetown would not be in possession of a draft today. Okay, so number one challenge for me in election regulation is that we do not have a quorum to make decisions at the fec right now. Were supposed to have six commissioners and were down to three. We lost one three years ago, we lost another one two years ago, and we lost a third about just over 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 making 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, even when had a quorum, it was difficult to get anything done because the commission has been for some years now extremely ideologically divided. Polarization a big problem in washington. You can imagine, youre going to have a problem with polarization. The commissioners on the republican side and the commissioners on the democratic side have very different views on whether any regulation of money and politics is indeed advisable. One example of that is a rulemaking 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 from the other side for some period of time before we lost the quorum. The commission lasted a comprehensivive look at the internet and politics on the internet in 2006, 2007. 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 superpac and the Hillary Clinton campaign were alleged to have coordinated through a 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, therefore, we could do all sorts of stuff as long as the end result was a communication on the internet. Our office of general counsel and two commissioners disagreed with that, but i think that just interestingly, enough, although it was democratic responded, it was the democratic commissioners who wanted to proceed and the republican commissioners who blocked the investigation. That was a problem. We seen the internet used as a way of sending both very open messages, candidates posting b roll on their websites in order to have superpacs pick it up, even though theyre not supposed to be coordinating. As well as subterfuge, we had coded messages tweeted out and a debate about whether that constituted public information. So weve had what i described as a digital needle in a virtual haystack. So we have 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 framework as broadcast ads, and i would also love to see the Congress Pass the deter act or Something Like that, bipartisan proposals to address foreign interference in our elections by imposing strong sanctions on anyone who would try it. I dont know why we cant get commonsense rules like that passed. Why is all of this important, what goes on on the internet in politics . Onethird of americans rate the internet as the most helpful source of information on the 2016 president ial election. This was according to a pew poll. Digital political advertising increased 260 between 2014 and 2018 and is projected for 2020 to reach 2. 8 billion. So this is not a small venue. And it is there are, as ive said, large areas of it that are completely unregulated right now. For this symposium, we decided to look not in the federal but in the 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 shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another content provider. Theres this expansive area of exemption from liability for all the internet providers that was created in 1996. So if our internet regulations from 2007 are out of date, imagine looking at something that was written in 1996 when they specifically said the sponsors, said that they were trying to protect this baby industry. They 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 had income of a mere 17. 65 billion. That was just in one quarter. I dont know that we can fairly say that theyre still babies in their cribs that we need to caudal and protect. There was a lot of excitement about the internet as a source of political information that could be low cost and would allow upstart candidates to avoid the big money race and get their message out. What weve seen is theres a real dark side to politics on the on the internet. Internet companies, microtarget political advertising which i can talk about later. They create filter bubbles. They create an atmosphere where counterspeak cant really emerge. So you know you get very narrowly targeted ads directed just at you, somebody else who might have different ideas doesnt see the same set of ads. So they dont know that they might to provide you with information to counter those arguments. The internet can amplify political misinformation and disinformation. We saw this coming from russia in the 2016 election but what is kind of scary is that now were seeing domestic actors that are mimicking some of these soviet style disinformation campaigns and while i can imagine various ways of going at foreign interference its harder when its coming from domestic sources. The platforms are failing to adequately protect against foreign interference in our elections so at least they have gotten beyond the point at 2016 where they were getting money for ads in rubles and it didnt occur to them maybe that was a problem. They caught that now theyre not doing that anymore. The algorithms are designed to promote at all costs staying on the platform and they 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 accusers and bots and 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 so effective is, you know, 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 is and companies are marketing that. Who would even think that your flashlight was collecting data on you . But the but because of section 230 theres this broad immunity because the platforms are not seen as the originators of the content and one judge said that the way that the platforms are packaging the information is something akin to a content provider that hasnt won over thats an outlier decision with that one judge. The panel went the other way. But i do think that is it shows that, you know, people are thinking about it differently. The platforms are not operating like the phone company where theyre just transmitting information blindly through the pipes. They are taking an active role in packaging and selecting what youre going to see. You know, personally, i would not be averse to seeing inroads on 230 on those grounds. However, we can get at it at a different way by simply making them pay for the information that theyre stealing from all of us. A platform that was, you know, started in a dorm room and with the philosophy of move fast and break things seems to have when they now that they have broken things their approach seems to be more like go slow and dont clean up your messes. So i think we need on the creative about how we go after these problems and one way would be to impose that on the front and end and rebalance and reallocate the costs where they believe. I think this information does belong to us and if the platforms were forced to pay for the data that theyre taking from us that would create different kinds of incentives, maybe they wouldnt have so much targeted advertising. And in any event, you know, 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 could which would describe as a democracy dividend that could be used for things like fund public media, Public Campaign financing an im told thats the end of the presentation and ill stop there but im happy to answer any questions on it. Thank you. Patrick . Alex, could i borrow that clicker good afternoon, im patrick dehay. Im a senior policy commissioner at cloud fair. I want to say thank you to georgetown and alex for holding this important and timely discuss. Though before i start to talk about voter privacy i would be remiss if i didnt mention two programs that cloud fair is offering to state and local governments in terms of protecting their Web Properties from service attacks and firewall protections. There is now 174 donations associated with state and local governments in 26 states that are using the Free Security services under the program. We Just Launched a similar one for campaigns. I actually have nothing to do with either of those programs. They predate my time at the company but im proud to be associated with them and if you have questions about them or want more information, please let me know. In 2018 as alex mentioned i was the National Security council for senator feinstein. Our committee was in the middle of the inquiry into russian interference in the 2016 election and i was asked to look into the Cambridge Analytica. Im sure everyone is familiar with the footage. This is undercover footage from the Cambridge Analytica ceo, he was caught on tape offering to use prostitutes from ukraine and bribery to entrap politicians in the fake election in asia. In nigeria where they had used email hacking to obtain sensitive medical information in order to throw the election. As you might imagine that was an interesting fact pattern for our committee at the time. But actually over time, as we started to look into their activities i became much more interested in the things that cambridge was doing in the open and what they were doing with voter data in the United States and how they became to occupy the role in the United States politics. So in context, they worked in 44 raises in 2014 in the United States. They worked in 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 to talk about Cambridge Analytica but i want to talk about three points relevant about regulating the use of data in the election space. Over the course of the investigation, the two questions that i got asked most often were what is psychographic targeting and does it really work . So psychographic targeting is a term developed largely in the commericial sector for Online Advertising. The premise is that using your individual personality traits which are inferred from data gathered about you online about social media like facebook, and measuring your openness, extra version, eroticism, messages targeted at you based on the much more likely to predict your behavior and as a consequence more likely to alter that behavior. And for commercials, the objective is to make you buy pants or shoes or etcetera. It has a different connotation when applied in the electoral context. The three studies i put up on here on the slide were referred to as by engineers at cambridge and i thought they stand for three important principles or things that i wasnt aware of prior to the investigations. 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 the sneakers youre revealing highly personal information about your calculated by algorithms so they found they can use the facebook likes to accurately predict sexual orientation, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender. So information you may not have never revealed publicly is now available through the algorithms. The second piece is that computers do a better job of figuring those things out than even humans. With 300 facebook likes they could determine your personality assessment more accurately than your spouse. And the third piece yeah, right. I have no additional comment on whether thats a valid measure or not. The third piece and i think this is where it hits home, you see the term digital mass persuasion. They did a real world study of 3. 5 million people. They found that by using individuals underlying psychological traits to target messages at them they resulted in 40 more clicks and 50 more purchases through the campaign. And ill just read one passage that they put on the front of the report as to why it was important. They said digital mass persuasion could be used to covertly exploit weakables in peoples character and persuade them to take action. And the second point about Cambridge Analytica and the quote is partially obscured by the picture but we know a couple of things about Cambridge Analytica and the russian government. So one we know that the Cambridge Analytica ceo was briefing individuals associated with russian intelligence on their u. S. Voter targeting activities. We know that Cambridge Analytica data including the cycle the psychographic models were accessed from russia and at the same time they were engineering the specific outcome and that theyre doing it all over the world. The second piece which is i think 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 28 in 2017. The third paint about Cambridge Analytica this was mentioned before, they werent alone. So cambridge no longer exists, however, i just took a quick collection of entities im sure there are more. These are groups that either employ former Cambridge Analytica the staff, contracted with Cambridge Analytica while they existed in the United States or provided Similar Services to similar clients. One of the companies on the slide i wont say which reportedly is offering a app that was developed for a u. S. Politician to collect voter data in Eastern Ukraine on behalf of a russian leaning ukrainian president