Good evening everyone, thank you for coming out here tonight. My name is rachel miro, i had to make sure by looking at the sheet of paper. I am the Senior Editor of our silicone valley desk here in san jose. I say here in san jose, but here in Silicon Valley because we are in mountain view. Joining me on the stage is the director of internet ethics, alex stall moos, former chief security officer, and the director of the stanford internet observatory. Director of journalism and media ethics at Markkula Center. This evening is copresented with the Markkula Center for applied ethics. This is part of this series on common ground. It is an initiative bringing people together for civil discourse featuring journalist hosting provocative conversations about politics, policy, arts and culture, science and technology. Reckoning with the force of disagreement among us about how to face the future of economic, culture and environmental uncertainty. This serious asks what are our shared responsibilities to the common good. Next in the series, if you have an open calendar this tuesday at 7 pm, at the San Francisco exploratory, we will be looking at how we overcome the polarization of tonights topics. On to tonights topic. Democracy is under attack worldwide. Populism is on the rise, disinformation is tool number one, and social media is the platform of choice. What we do about . It we can start by talking. It and i take it you have some show intel to offer us about the topic for today. Perhaps youve already read in the New York Times that russia is again attempting to influence the American Election for president. Yes, that is what we read in the times. That was a briefing that was given to the house subcommittee on intelligence. It but there are no details. We dont know exactly what they mean by that. From my perspective there are five different kinds of interference, it is not clear if they are doing the same playbook sore doing something different. Show us a few examples of what we remember from the 2016 election. Some of us dont remember it because we never saw it on our feeds. When the audience was not the total target. But surprisingly, against conventional wisdom you will find that a lot of the russian disinformation was aimed at both left and right. The two major, if i can get my slides up. The two major types of disinformation from, or Information Operation is the term we use, it to make a concerted attempt to change a information environment. It had two big directions. First, was medic warfare. It is about driving division by creating radical means that are injected into political discourse. In this case there are three examples from both sides of fake profiles, fake personas that were created by a group created by them that belongs to a russian oligarch. The one on the left is supposed to be a pro lgbt group. In this case it is a lgbt coloring book for Bernie Sanders, this is a funny little thing that you might post with the goal of getting people to join your group and disappear content. And then most of the content had nothing to do with elections or politics, it was content like this to draw people in and that would allow them to object messages. A lot was anti immigrant sentiment. This was a twitter account that was the Tennessee Republican party, but it turned out the Tennessee RepublicanParty Social Media internet lived in st. Petersburg, russia. Not florida. Heres a more from instagram. As you see it comes from both sides. All the tones are nude, get over it comes from a fake account on instagram called blacks to. Graham a big topic was black lives matter, a big goal of theirs was to try to build African American support for these fake personas and then inject messages about hillary being racist. It was stolen from burning as well as messages that might have been seen by conservatives and then seen as very radical. I will give you a second look at this before i ask you some questions. Check out this post. This is from a fake black lives matter group, it reads black panthers were dismantled so, obviously that you would probably notice the strange diction, the english isnt perfect. This kind of work by the russians is being done not by intelligence specialists, the Internet Research agency are effectively lentils with english miners that could not find better jobs in russia. These folks are not professionals. The language will not be perfect. Now that im a fake professor, i will ask you guys, this being posted by somebody in st. Petersburg, russia is illegal . Raise your hand if you think it is illegal . Only one person. You are right. This is not illegal for somebody out of the country to have an opinion about the black panthers, even if they are lying about themselves. It is a violation of facebooks terms of service. They do not have a force of law. Is this fake news . Raise your hand if you call this fake news. That is interesting, the thing here is they are not making any falsify ball claims. This kind of argument of what was the reason why the u. S. Government prosecuted the black panthers is the kind of thing that you might find in a freshman studies. This is an argument in political discourse that they are trying to amplify. Remind us, the over ten window. Do one of the real professors want to talk about that. Im not a political scientists. We are all fake professors. The overtaken window is the idea is what is the range of acceptable discourse, these are the things that are allowed in any society, in this case americans aside the. That window can shift back and forth based on people being on the extremes. This is a real email, want to guess who received it . John podesta. The real tough for the russians to figure out his email, this is what he received telling him that somebody had tried to sign in to his account, it was sent by the main intelligence director of the kremlin. We are talking real intel people, people that like to kill people overseas. Theyre little joke here is that the person trying to break into the account is from ukraine, those oh those guys are hilarious. It and instead it goes to you or l shorten or that sent him to a site called google dash accounts. It was a perfect looking google login. He asked the i tea people at the dnc whether it was legit and apparently that guy replied that it looked okay. But he meant to say it does not look okay. The most important typo in the history of the human race. He logs into that and gives his use and password and they go and download all his email. They also broke into the dnc with more technically sophisticated work. When they had that information, they were not releasing fake accounts. They were not releasing fake information, a cherry picked the emails that told the story they wanted to tell. That was the story that Bernie Sanders was ripped off in the dnc primary. To do so they power that message through real emails, where people were saying not nice things about Bernie Sanders. They did it through fake profiles. That failed. So they try to get through the organization that they were pretending was a real leak site like wikileaks. D. C. Leaks reached out to a bunch of journalists and said, here are some documents from jon podesta and the journalists complied. Politico ran a blog of what they were going through. And even the New York Times ended up running with the stories over and over again that they wanted them to run. If you go to paragraph nine or ten it says, this might be part of a russian Information Operation, but it doesnt matter when that is your headline and thats what people are reading. Some other examples of disinformation, these are to real Whatsapp Messages. India, people use the internet differently. Something like 400 Million People have accounts on whats up. It is not like facebook where you can post something Million People see, you can send a message up to 200 people. Folks in india are parts of many groups. Family, school, work. So messages get passed along by individuals copying and pasting messages that are injected in. The one on the left is from attacking the conservative Political Party in charge of india. Possibly support of the congress party. It basically lying about the price of gasoline in other countries. The one on the right is racist propaganda. Disinformation looks a lot different because when you see, when you look at this, it is saying i am from this black lives matter group. When you see this disinformation it is coming from your uncle, and her coworker. It is personal. It is harder to amplify but whats happening in india is that you have these groups that work for political parties. The theory is that there is about 1 Million People who have signed up to push disinformation. They believe it is the right news on the behalf of political parties. They get a notification and they copy and paste it and send it out to 400 Million People. We are still seeing this kind of russian led activity around the world. This is up a report that we wrote what we found was a disinformation that work in africa run by russian groups, which is a company he owns that has paramilitary mercenaries. People that go into countries to kill people on behalf of auto cracks. They are supporting autocrats on the ground with guns and disinformation. To do so it is not for just Foreign Policy but for financial benefits. He has things like diamond mines and the like. He is back in two of the six people vying for control of libya to get gas and oil rates in the future. The interesting to changes from 2016 now is one, this is no longer people sitting in st. Petersburg. They have been hired in those countries, and they are reporting back to people in st. Petersburg. One of the guys doing it posted a picture of a picture of moscow on his instagram account. That is kind of awesome. The people doing this work in the sudan are actually sitting in sudan so theres much hutch are hard to catch them. The cultural language is much better. It is multi media. This is a whole newspaper it seems like a legit newspaper. It is mostly not about russia. It is just newspaper. And it is owned by him. He also owns the radio station. They are building the entire pipeline, they can manipulate the media that they also create their own media and amplify that media on line. Lets start with that. That is a little overwhelming. Yes, thank you. It theres so many Different Things to parse out in alex is presentation. But one of the first things that occurs to me, that question of whatsapp. There are so many people around the world who are on encrypted platforms even though you can argue that journalist and regulators are not doing a very good job where the information is out in the open, they dont even less good job when the information is encrypted. If you take indias example, whatsapp is a particular case where there is cultural acceptance, whatsapp is used in india in restaurants to pass out menus, that is used also to order from those restaurants. Afterwards your Restaurant Owners will share more with you. There is an inter personal acceptance of liberal privacy in the sense that, i dont mind you sharing something with me even though i dont really know you other than a transactional relationship. In the u. S. It is a different kind of sensibility. If i get a Whatsapp Message with the video from somebody i dont even know, first of all, i may not have a whatsapp connection with people in that sense. There is a huge advantage that these actors have in places like india where whatsapp is literally an interpersonal thing. And transactional thing at the same time. One of the things that will help to understand is it existed because of the centralized paradigms of ownership in the media from print to radio. As long as media was owned by a few organizations, ten to 30, there is a cultural sensibility and acceptance of values built in. That all broke with social media. There is no such thing as acceptable window for what is acceptable in a democracy for public speech. That is what is broken. Part of the question though is who is responsible for the changes in the window . It was not that long ago that social media started. When it started people were not sharing news articles. Remember, the idea was to connect you with your friends and family. At some point that paradigm shifted. Part of the responsibility lies with the social Media Companies which have certain afford insists. They grind you as to what you should be using it for. In 2013, marks october came out and said we want to be everyones personalized newspaper. Facebook was not something that people thought of as a newspaper but suddenly there is this encouragement that you should be sharing new stories. Suddenly, maybe aunt fellas is endorsing this message. That is how comes across. Some of the responsibility lies with the platforms themselves. Some lies with us win. I think one of the promises of the internet was that with the advent of blogging, we are all journalists now people said. It turns out, no we are not. But with social media we are loudspeakers for peoples message. That is a different role that we are all journalists. We all kind of bought into this role and find ourselves doing it. When we talk about responsibility, we have to talk about these different layers. I found an interesting poll that was done last month by npr, they asked people who should have the main responsibility for addressing disinformation. Addressing disinformation is vague, do you mean to not do it, to not respond to it, highlight it . But the numbers where these, 39 said the media have the main responsibility about addressing this information. 18 pointed to technology companies, that is half as many. 50 said the government and 12 to the public. Of those who felt it was the medias primary responsibility, 29 of them were democrats assigned the made responsibility to the media and 59 of republicans do. We are polarized even on who is responsible for doing something about this. Im as a journalist, people do not always want to accept the information they are receiving. You say, this is it this is that information for the question that you had. But the response is, that is not what i believe. As if it is a matter of opinion. Because some people are not looking for information, theyre looking for confirmation and theyre looking to signal identity and be part of a certain group. So increasingly im reading about this that people know they are sharing misinformation and they are okay with that because that is not the point. The point is not to inform people, it is to show what you believe. I think what is really interesting for the rest of us is that we have these calming human weaknesses that make us do the same thing, even if we dont mean to. What i have learned, my colleagues will tell you that i have to check myself, if i find something that is absolutely the best illustration of what i believe, like this just confirms everything that i believe. I have to sit on it. More often than not it is a setup. It is designed exactly for people like me to respond that way and share it with others and outrage. And then perpetuate that this information, which as alex points out is not an outright lie. It is out of context. Or it is made to push a certain narrative. I kind of wonder, as recently as two years ago, i was among those who were keen to laugh at politicians and regulators as so behind the times. Unable to find their left or right hand. Of course it would be no position to craft laws that would be out of date as soon as the ingress dry. Now, i do not know. The whole disinformation situation online is such a dumpster fire. I dont know if theres anybody whos on top of it. Even if they did nothing but read facts all day. What is this message for what we can do from a regulatory standpoint to try and control some of this. Or is that hopeless . In the United States, we are extremely limited by the First Amendment. Yesterday i was in washington, i may look like im asleep with my eyes open, i was at an event by the department of justice which was about the 2 30 with a say that Tech Companies need to fix things. The vast majority of things people complain about, with what is called 2 30 is the First Amendment. Political speech is almost never any criminal or civil liability. Even if it is false. The Supreme Court has said if you lie intentionally, in most cases it is not a crime. It cant be a crime and cannot be punished. Theres two about it. But for political topics you cant. Most of the stuff we are talking about is something that you would never be able to adjudicate as false, even if we are on a different country. The regulatory in the United States does not have a lot of options. Even other countries things the most effective regulation has been the next law, which is a 27 letter german word that i cannot pronounce. That is a law that requires the Tech Companies to enforce german hate speech laws. But that is hate speech law. It is not about true or false from, and even that has had some real issues when it starts to apply things likes her chasm in comedy. In the u. S. The regulation is the place, not the content of but the mechanisms for which people can do political advertising. I would like to see some rules that figure out everybody is guessing what the rules are for political advertising are. The fcc is not ruled about how these eighties and nineties law apply to 2020. I would like to see something that has restrictions for political ads about kind of target getting you can do. A minimum size, you cannot target nra members in one town. Lets not pretend that people here, multiple people and here have given to pledge drives. Some you could limit so you could you have to advertised too much broader sense of people and have rules around transparency. My colleagues at stanford who studied these issues, believe that you can