Countering disInformation Campaigns. Officials from the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency spoke about Critical Thinking and resilience in moments of polarization. It is cohosted by the embassy of sweden and the Digital Forensics research lab. Good morning everyone. My name is karin olofsdotter. I have the great honor of serving as the ambassador for sweden for the u. S. You may wonder why youre in a black room. I thought the architect had run out of ideas and money but it is to show you how dark it is scandinavia in the wintertime. Dont let that put you off. Do come and visit our wonderful country. Its great for your you americans, drop travel it is wonderful to see so many of you today. Joining us online from. I want to thank the Council DigitalResearch Forensic lab for cohosting the event and to the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of sciences, their partners and supporting organizations. Todays event is part of the nobel prize summit. Its a testament to the enduring legacy of one of the most famous swedes of all time. What we do is celebrate his vision for world shaped by knowledge, peace and progress. The theme of this years nobel prize summit is truth, trust and hope. How can we build trust in troop, fact that scientific evidence, to create hope for the future for all of us. That is an important question on days like this. Todays discussion on fighting disinformation cannot be more relevant. In our digitalized and connected world, with access to an abundance of information, in forensic activities are a persistent threat. We, no, unfortunately now, unfortunately are experiencing increased tensions and conflict around the world. We see influence complains campaigns exploiting our vulnerabilities. They are gaining traction, and are spread throughout our society. This development is challenging the values that are fundamental to our way of life, such as democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Nobel was convinced that ideas and scientific discovery are at the heart of human progress, towards a better world. We are hosting this event in sweden, freedom ofs breach freedom of speech and expression are two core values for the swedish government. More often, disinformation is threatening these ideals. The issue is not only a matter of truth but a matter of trust. In the open dialogue which our democracies rely on. The threat is global and requires global response. We need widespread corporation, understanding and determination to effectively counteract development and uphold democratic values. And the Scientific Solutions that really work, we must listen to the experts. Were super excited to have with us a nobel laureate, martin chancey, who will share his insight into the scientific aspect of this issue. Were joined by magness, the director general of the sweetest agency for psychological defense, whose understanding of operational aspects of this issue is key in finding solutions. We are happy to welcome rebecca trumbull, who is director of the institute of data and policy at georgetown university. George washington university. He is in this town too. I mix them up. Excuse me. Dr. Trumbull has deep knowledge on these issues based on her own research on political communication, digital research, mythology and research ethics. With this excellent panel, i am certain that this seminar will provide important insights and knowledge. We all need to learn, to identify, understand, and counteract information in our daily lives. Its really our shared responsibility. Directly after this panel, we will get some of the necessary tools to tackle disinformation, as our colleagues from the Swedish Agency for psychological defense will lead us in an educational workshop. These are the tools we need to foster resilience, defined counter strategies, and strength and trust. Only together can we face the challenge, safeguard our democratic values, and ensure freedom of speech and democratic discourse are upheld. I really look forward to todays thoughtprovoking and insightful discussion. With this, i would like to welcome and handed this over to the atlanta councils lab. Thank you so much for being with us today. [applause] thank you so much, not a member asked her. Its madame ambassador. Its wonderful experience the amount of either darkness or sunlight depending on what season youre in, in this building. If you want it to feel like winter, come down here. If want it to feel like prolonged summer in alltime daylight, you go upstairs. Depending on what your mood is, i want to do housekeeping on that front. In the spirit of building true trust, there is one slight inundation to our agenda for this morning. Dr. Trumbull had a family emergency and is not able to join us. So, were really excited to be joined by katrina, who runs the Capacity Building programs Educational Programs within the Swedish Agency we work with. Really looking forward to the conversation. I think, madame ambassador, opened it up very well. I do not have my phd. Ill be using a number of notes, as opposed to my astute colleagues appear. Up here. What we will be talking about today is not only miss and disinformation, but what we do about it. My hope for this conversation is not just to navel gaze on a big problem we know as a societal challenge, but to get in the weeds about our understanding and what we go do about it. Which, i think this group is going to be particularly well placed to do. The first question last bit of housekeeping, well talk for 30 minutes, then we will turn over to audience q a for about 15 minutes before going to the workshop. If you have burning questions for any of us, be thinking about those. The first question we had a chance to connect before this conversation. And one of the things that came up in terms of how we look at this field, as a scientific field, was this concept that was popularized at the onset of the pandemic in which we face the moment where it was pronounced, in which people all over the world were inundated with information. The term that became more popularized for that phenomenon that was happening in parallel to the pandemic was infodemic. I will turn to martin. How do you feel about infodemic and is it something that grows rapidly or is it a drip, drip, drip . Does it have a Snowball Effect . What does it do in terms of diminishing trust . Is it immediate, revolutionary, or somewhat revolutionary over time . It can work in many ways. The basic idea, as he pointed out, is to have a lot of noise. If you have a lot of noise, you cant tell what is the truth, whats made up, its just youre overwhelmed with information. Youre overwhelmed with statements that muddy your understanding. And w having to and having to wade through that is the difficult part. Its this idea that the infodem ic, not only is there misinformation or disinformation, purposeful falsehoods, but rather that theres so much of it around, that it obscures what is happening. I would say there is another aspect to this. I would call false equivalence. That there are two points of view. They are both equal. When in fact, 97 of People Climate change, it is talked about a lot, 97 of all scientists had opinions, 3 were another. You never saw television percent where there were 97 people on one side, you saw one in one it made a false equivalence. That is another way of flooding and that is another way of letting the airwaves with information that just blocks out what has already been a consensus. The way that we think about this moment in our daytoday work is two coinciding factors that are global. One is we as a human to raise have more access to information, whether it is true or false or whether it is debated or whatever in this moment in history. There has never been a moment where you can pull out any number of the devices that we have on our person regularly and google it or search for the answer to the question. And then, number two, there has never been a moment and she would history it where we are is connected or have the opportunity to be as connected as we are right now, so that is an accelerant for sure. I guess my followup question on infodemic, do you think the inundation of information somewhat illogically leads to less space for debate or discovery of a shared set of facts among the population . I think it can. I am not entirely sure. I am sure we will come up with other people here, which is how does one develop Critical Thinking and where most important of these three words for this summit i think is trust. How do you learn what to trust, who to trust . And that cuts down on the other problems. I think that it is the building of trust in glorified science that is a critical thing we need to do in the future. So we will go back to Critical Thinking in just a moment, but in the meantime, we have the pleasure and responsibility of sitting in a democracy at this point. All of us that are on the stage, and a big part of building that trust is the role of government into democracy, a government that is for people and by people. And, magnus, you are in government right now with a storied career in academia as well as public service. So i guessed my basic question with a long followup is what is the role and responsibility of government in this space of building that trust and engaging with populations on this issue in particular . And i guess the point of context for this group is that we are sitting in washington, d. C. , and in the swedish system it makes sense that the agency you run is the Psychological Defense Agency, and there is a long story history and culture of that in sweden, so what does that look like and how do you think about the role of government given your spacing government and how you engage with populations and do your work . Thank you. [laughter] yes, a real government agency, psychological defense could sound a bit scary to for eight years that are not used to this kind of swedish concept that is also spread to other countries. I think estonia also use the term psychological defense. It was established in sweden in the early 1940s as a term of establishing a counter work again psychological warfare, and it only makes sense. If you must have psychological warfare, must have psychological defense. What we said back then is psychological defense is just as important as airplanes. We stood in front of enemies like nazi germany a declared war on the rest of the world more or less and we tried to develop a total defense to combat our task is to safeguard democracy, safeguard free speech, freedom of opinion. Swedens freedom and independence, so that is the basis for what we try to do. And i like to say that psychological defense in sweden rests on three pillars. The first is free, independent media. That is totally vital. Independent journalism is extremely important for what we call psychological defense. The other is a informed and well educated population, which is something that we are trying to build within our education system, of course, but also through our free media. And the third pillar is trust, trust between people, trust in institutions, trust in the media. Without those three, you will have a lapse of psychological defense. We do operations, we monitor for an information influences. We do not monitor domestic misinformation or disinformation. Only foreign. Should we go in the domestic scene that would infringe on free speech in sweden. We only look abroad. That is very important. And that we do capability or Capacity Building, which cuts in and we can tell you more about, and we also tried to prepare for a possible wartime situation in the future. There is a major war going on in europe, as you all know, and this has completely changed the situation for many countries in europe, for ukraine of course, but also for sweden. We have made an application for membership in nato. The situation as deteriorated, and also democracy it has declined. There are quite a few organizations trying to measure democracy in the world globally, and they are all unanimous in saying democracy has pushed back. You could almost say that democracy is under siege, and this is something that we need to change really, because democracy is vital for us all, for the security of everybody, so i think there is a great deal to do, and we need all to engage in that i think to safeguard democracy. It seems like the conceptual way to put that is protecting the parameters of debate within swedish democracy, from things like foreign manipulation, but also protecting speech, number one, and the ability to keep it is like putting not necessarily a border but protecting the parameters of an open information environment, which in many ways is the greatest strength of free and open systems or democracies. And in addition to that is sometimes a major vulnerability landscape that we have to look at and say how do we make this more resilient . Which is a good segue to something martin mentioned in the very first question on how do we build more Critical Thinking in the space or how do we engage with public and it build up that trust over time . Because it is not something that happens overnight. It is not like a flip of the switch where they are trustworthy on monday and not choice within the next day. So within the role of government , how do you think about the Capacity Building and the training or the educational aspect of engaging with the publics on this issue . What does the program look like, but more importantly, what is the first step . Thank you for that. We are trying to raise all of society, and we are doing this by, for example, building on capacity, contributing on the strength of the populations resilience by its rating knowledge and contributing to the population and relevant actors from all levels, so they are prepared in terms of psychological defense. And it starts early. It starts by learning kids and youth in school about fact checking, as we said, and also by Building Trust in institutions, but we also support government of support on all governmental levels Front National to regional to local levels, and that is how to identify disinformation that is directed at sweden and how it approaches at Different Levels. There is a big interest from the schools, but it is also from a municipality level. For example, earlier this year we met with over 100 municipality officials in sweden, and one step that we have learned that is efficient is using red teamblue team workshops. First we start off by being the antagonists aiming on their vulnerabilities. Thank you. The same group is the blue team and trying to counter this disinformation, and this is the work we see also that they can bring for their resilience work on all levels, and also their preparedness planning, so that is one of the first steps that we are using, and it is been very successful. I have one million questions on this, because we engage with Civil Society all the time in training Capacity Building, so how do you look at the online information environment and to in a major way . Whether that is human rights abuses in any place in the world, so security related research or at looking at overarching narratives and how they impact the population. And it is scientific. We are looking at how the nuts and bolts of an information environment were and how humans interact within an information environment, so within our Capacity Building, i really want to talk shop with you. In your experience, do students preferred to be on the red team or the blue team . This is for the government officials. We have not done it in the schools, but i can say that the red team workshop, everyone is really, like, there are so many things coming up, and they have a really fun time doing it, and that is just part of when you are countering it. How do you do that . You do not have the team counter everything. It is a really nice way of listing the problems and also bringing together all of these actors from Different Levels on how they can learn from each other, and also as i said bringing this to misinformation and psychological defense into total defense planning. My hypothesis on this, given we are talking about a scientific field of research is that red team would foster more creativity and a little bit more energy, whereas the blue team would foster more, oh man, what are we going to do about this . It is harder to build resilience more than poke holes in things. Easier to build things as opposed to tearing things down. It is not every day that i share a stage with somebody who won a nobel prize just as a moment of reference, but in terms of the Scientific Method of building knowledge, i guess and this is not a plant question, so bear with to be here. How does a detachment from fact, whether that is the unintentional spreading false information or the intentional spread of false information or just kind of the inundation that we are talking about of so much information that it is hard to ours through parse through, how does that impact the work of the scientific field, which is a deliberate method . The more pointed way to asked that question is how can you prove to me that green fluorescent 13 is a biological marker . If i was at the thanksgiving table, then how does that conversation work into Building Trust on something that is genuinely and by definition breakthrough knowledge or information . So i think there are a lot of elements to this. I think the first part is i do not think there is a Scientific Method. I think we teach a Scientific Method to Elementary School students, but there are many ways of making discoveries. If you look at that nobel prize biographies, you will be astonished to find how many people say i was doing this, and then by mistake this happened. And i notice this and i went on to work on that. We have this idea about a Scientific Method is that we come up with a problem and then we come up with a hyp