Left the first panelist here is laura and she is the wellknown voice on National Public radio Digital Culture correspondent. I hope many of you heard or will listen to her amazing story, one of the stories that really brought the issue alive in my mind. She tracked down a company with me, with big new sites and that air for the first time last november as been listen to many times since. Adam, we are very happy to have someone here who is very high up as Vice President of newsfeed at facebook. 1. 8 billion people are using facebook now. Adam manages the team responsible for delivering relevant content. That is news cant to all of those facebook users. Recently, facebook has taken some important steps to address the problem of fake news on their platform. We are delighted to have his presence. We have Craig Newmark with us. Craig is a web pioneer. The founder of craigslist. He is a speaker and a philanthropist who also introduces himself as modestly as a news consumer. He can also claim to be one of the internets best known nerds. But all of this comes right up from his own selfdescription. He recently generously donated 1 million to the Poynter Institute in order to promote verification, Fact Checking and the council ability and journalism. As much as anyone i know craig has taken steps to address the problem. We are joined by two members of the uc berkeley faculty. Catherine crump is a law professor and codirector of berkeley laws samuelson law, technology and Public Policy clinic. She specializes in first and Fourth Amendment and media issues and all about censorship. And what you can and cannot do. And jeffrey is uc Berkeleys University librarian. He focuses on economics of the internet, online behavior and Digital Information and creation and distribution. Finally, our moderator is dean ed wasserman. He is the professor and dean of the graduate school of journalism. His specialty is media ethics. He blogs, perhaps very appropriately titled on social media. [laughter] you can find that ewasserman. Com. I want to thank you, the audience for your interest in this hot topic. With that, ed wasserman. Thank you. And thank you all for coming out tonight. [applause] i also want to welcome a number of reporters in the audience. The New York Times, guardian, the daily californian. We have a strong Interdisciplinary Panel tonight. And i thank you all for participating. The format, we have roughly an hour and and a half to play with. I figured we would divide it approximately in half. Spend 45 minutes with a discussion confined to the panel. I am looking for or hoping for a lively discussion. Not necessarily an orderly one. And then youre welcome to talk to each other, interrupt each other and to move the conversation along i will be tossing out questions and goading you and im not happy with your answers. Then after 45 minutes or so, we will open the floor to questions, opening the floor is observed, always a troubling concept. Let me just take this off with an opening thought. I was thinking back to when i started getting interested in the media. This was the late 60s and early 70s. And the shadow of a great deal of very exciting and very much utopian as talk about the world of democratized discourse that the media would enable and if you had told me then that 40, 50 years hence i would have this device that would give me access to bigger audiences than the widest circulated newspaper on earth had, and would give me access to more information and the best source reported on earth had, i would say that sounds like paradise. It sounds like that would be what it democratized communications sphere looks like where people are communicating and enabled and we would have exceeded the paradise. Instead, here we are. And we are finding that there is a dark underside to that. We are finding when we look around the people are in fact laboring, they believe things that are not true then perhaps ever before. And more people are acting on believes that they misunderstand or understand are not true than ever before. We find that this wondrous world of technologically enabled vacations paradise has now turned around and biting himself in the backside. Let me start by asking, and i guess i will awe are finding more people that are enthralled by the shadows in the cave. What do we do . Let me start with this question. I will invite is being brandished as an allpurpose slogan to describe everything from errors to deliberate falsehoods. It no longer is agreed upon is identifying a government phenomenon. So what are we talking about and what conclusions can we draw about the way the term is now being fought over . And the elastic way it is being applied. So laura why dont you start us off. I guess i want to say there is any difference in intense. And there is a big difference. People were in the fake news business, you know what they are doing. I know it is fake as opposed to any journalist who is trying to get it right, makes a mistake. So i would argue for example some people say while Judith Miller is reporting on weapons of mass destruction was fake news. It was not big news, she made a horrible im a horrible mistake. But the guy that deirdre mentioned, that i found, this is real fake news and it is very profitable. We decided to take one story within a meeting and i got the assignment to take one story and jason all the way back. One fake news story that got a lot of attention and in this case, it was a story of an fbi agent did an an apparent murder suicide. And this fbi agent had been investigating Hillary Clintons emails. So they wanted you to think it was something to do with it. And if you know something about the conspiracy theories, about the clintons they kill people are. But this was not. So trying to find where this came from was the idea. Who was this, who was it that was behind this . It was initially not that easy because usually you go to go daddy and you discover that there is a website and the website is, someone owns a domain name. In this case it was anonymous. I enlisted a techie to help me. And look at the internet like a paleontologist. And he was able to eventually get a name. He got me an address and i decided the best thing to do was go knock on his door. It turned out he was in Huntington Beach california and i had no idea what we were going to find. And i took a male intern with me because i was a little nervous about this. But we went to his door and i held the story in my hand and there he was. His name was justin kohler. I knocked on the door and i said, did you write this . We want to know if you wrote this. And he said no. I said to you on aand he said no. And he closed the door in our faces. It turns out he is an npr fan. [laughter] seriously. He gets back to us and says, all right, i will talk to you. Yes, i know about and yes, i do on the Denver Guardian website. And he absolutely knew he was doing fake news. In his case, he was a Hillary Clinton supporter two. He said he started the whole thing is kind of a joke. He wanted to show how crazy the altar right was. How easy it was to spread fake news and the alt right echo chamber. He said he is making between 10 and 30,000 a month. And he had a whole little empire, he had a whole bunch of other websites where he was putting the stuff out there. But it was absolutely intentional. Everything he said, everything about the Denver Guardian story was totally false and renew it. That is fake news. And i really do think theres a big difference between a reporter making a mistake, and what this gentleman was doing. I guess lastly, on this topic, i would say i feel like one of the things that has become or that is going on is a sense of wanting to make everybody confused. And i think that works in some peoples advantage. To have the world be confusing. Ive heard people talk about Steve Bannons interest in certain far right groups in europe and russia. You actually do use this tactic. As a political tactic. And so, i am nothing is but i think it is something they to think about. And i think it is we need to know what the intent is. Next i want to come back to how you make money with big news. You have identified a clear case of deliberate fabrication. The term is being applied far more broadly to capture an underlying dissatisfaction with the quality of information and the trustworthiness of the information. And it is plain to the political arena in unforeseen ways. I wonder what sense we make of that . Jeffrey, any thoughts . I think for a lot of purposes only talking the information distribution and people wanting to get information out there as providers and people want written information in as consumers, it is often useful to think about quality as being the dimension. There is high quality news, lowquality news or information. It is a spectrum of course. For some purposes i think they are being negative quality news. There are certain cases where people are intentionally manipulating. And as you say, but this is a little bit more of a nuance. I think the case you just described, he said he was making money on it. It doesnt sound like youre trying to actually persuade anybody to change their behavior. He wasnt trying to manipulate people. But some people are trying to manipulate and use lies essentially fraud to manipulate. So theres a malevolent intent. Especially if you are a platform provider for instance, as a platform provider you care about the quality of the news or the information being distributed to your platform. And you want more goodquality because you want more people to come to your platform and you want less bad quality. That spectrum is very hard to draw any lines on. And sometimes Platform Providers want Different Things with their consumers. They just want eyeballs and as long as they can attract eyeballs there selling them to advertisers. They make sure theres a different aspect of quality. And they also want repeat eyeballs. They keep delivering that information, they will not get repeat eyeballs. So to think about how to Design Systems and how to understand behavior in this business, i think first i like to think about it as a spectrum of quality with certain special cases where the problem is not just lowquality but may actually be in the malicious or negative quality. You are not suggesting quality that is driving the traffic . Well to some extent. People want information for different reasons. People want information just for entertainment. And they want things are actually fake because they find it more amusing and entertaining. So it is not a single dimension but there is, i think in repeated use there is a correlation certainly between quality and what is driving the traffic. People are going to recognize certain sources are more reliable than others. And the content provider wants to develop a significant business and keep it going they will care about the poly. Can we just interject one thing if i make . Part of the problem is facebook. Because it is an environment in which. [laughter], youre looking at all the things your friends share. So it is not the same as going to the times or breitbart. Bipolar to fact and google is working with the tram project was about means by which News Organizations can say hey, heres what trustworthy behavior. An oversimplified that comes to having a code of ethics and being serious about it. Ive spoken with twitter directly about the problem of dealing with it. These are really platform stand up for them hopefully and really near future ill be able to announce with wikipedia new steps and serious funding about dealing with harassment and trolling. Platforms are standing up but these are really old, really tough problems to deal with. Last week someone reminded me of about a fake news attack from fabian the fake will from more anthony because you want to raise military funding and support to go after anthony and cleopatra. This is not new stuff. It is really tough, and they are actually serious about doing something. You also want to be quiet about how you talk about it because when you talk about techniques, the bad guys are listening to what you are saying. You will see it pop up in black hat discussion boards, so you really want to leak stuff before youre ready to do something. I take your point. Its not new. I want to hear from facebook, but what has changed . In 2004 we had the swiftboat versus the Bush National guard story. Both were stories that had some factual basis. They were important. They were fiercely disputed. The veracity was disputed. How is that come in yet each side accused the other of proffering phony, fake news. What has changed now . What is different in the news environment now in since 2004 . I think sometimes its new and som sometimes her old. The problem of gullible people is timeless. Time of pickup and gullible people are long time. There will always be gullible people. Anyone who has email and received a forward from a relative understand this. Its hard to get those things to stop. I agree. One of the things that are new here are the platforms and ease with which some can create a news story which although it may sound fantastical too many of us, appeals to peoples, a trump supporter may be inclined to believe things and has a particular narrative, and you can easily create something that enhances that narrative which think its propagated. I think the speed with which that can happen is something thats new and would either same gateway after 2 20 meeting thate traditionally had. Adam, youve been mentioned. How does look from facebook suicide . Two Different Things. The nature of how people consume information is continuing to change. Specifically youre seeing more and more publishers, less and less entries. Theres more and more competition. Anybody, spent outside l. A. You can do that in a way that was harder 12 years ago a much harder 12 years before that and that it continued to change. I do think in general its important to separate issues because theres a bunch of different issues. Fake news is an issue. What we are talking about confirmation bias, another issue. Hateful speech which it touched on a second go which is another issue. I think how we think about things. I think at the heart of what were trying to nurture the ecosystem, create value for people but also create value for publishers so that can be symbiotic in some way. On the publisher side we try to create tools, facebook project early, creek valley. In pursuing both theres really two sides. Theres trying to nurture the good. Helping people find something meaningful by writing things better, better design, help people connect with this guy who is hopefully following npr, but also to reduce the negative. Fake news is one type of negative content. Click bates, nudity, hate speech, bullying. Violent content. We try to divide things into things like in the Student Voice and do we pursue those problems are different. Because the nature of value let me ask a crude question. Does facebook make money from what we would consider fake news . I think there are three things to be concerned about for facebook to go around the financial site a fake news. I think its super important because from what we can tell i researched them a lot a fake news publishers are financially motivated. Sometimes a switch from one party to another. One thing we worry about that doesnt seem to be a real issue is people dont use facebook to advertise fake news very much. Its not an effective advertising platform. We have strict policies and people, we can manually improve advertisers which is what we do. The thing i think which is where the financial value gets shifted to the fake news publishers using facebook, it is something we need to further reduce gum is getting free distribution. Dating a bunch of clicks on it, that takes much people to website, maybe its the paragraph and then 80 or 90 ads. We think of those as ads. Thats not financially benefiting facebook but it is shakseeking financial value to e news publishers. We need to do what we can to reduce the distribution that fake news publishers get as close as we can to zero. Thats what we are starting trying to do in december and we have more work to do. Can i have something on the financial front . This was an interesting thing justin told me, which was one of his sites was caught by google and the stop running ads on this site but the minute that happened, is in box was filled with literally hundreds of offers from other places that would run ads on his site. Unfortunately, the opportunity to run ads on your site is max spirit you can tell its profitable because of the secondary effects, for example, theres a group i think it is Sleeping Giants. They have identified what they think is a fake news site and every time they see an advertiser pop up on it, they contact the advertiser asking them to stop advertising there. And they claim its working. A lot depends on how you define what fake news or a fake new site is. But that seems to be working. Plus the ad networks, the bigger ones like google in particular, they are being asked to stop allowing advertising to be placed on fake news sites. There is a new ad network, an aggregator that focus on avoiding this thing. Im giving can credit because ii forget the name of the network. So things are happening which are improving things. Me, i hate to be so critical as to name news ad networks by name, but im really tired of seeing ads from our brain. If that stopped appearing in my reading on my phone, i would be pretty happy. Help me. Somebody on the panel help me. I want to understand, if i am an enterprising young person in macedonia and i want to make a bundle, so i come up with, i find some trending terms from google, things that are cleared of interest to vast number of people. I write a few stories, one of kanji west and Hillary Clinton and possibly a love triangle with somebody else, i cant think of the moment but kanye west. I post this story, its a complete fabrication, nicely done. I get pictures, i could do that, too. The next thing i have 500,000 people streaming through somewhere. At that point i have a serious, ive a series of footprint and so whos making money from that cracks you just google ad senate this . Is are some automated mechanism . It w