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 that content. Sometimes these categories and these words were quite stable, other times there were a lot of ambiguity that were there. Facebook similarly did this when thinking about how to regulate political speech. Last one i want to talk about is how this infrastructure governing itself. How are they thinking about circulating its speech on its own space. Probability seems to be this logic, this way of dealing with scale that was consistently engaged with. Facebook fact check manager said when partners rate something as false we rank those stories significantly lower our news feed. On our this cuts feature views by more than 80 . This number 80 came up a lot. Fact checkers not surprisingly said, i dont know how that number is calculated, we do not have any public proof of that, i cannot fact that claim, acclaim their own partnership was producing. I cannot fact check that claim, that is the problem. The question arose as 80 . Is a circle . They say they do not want to be an arbiter of truth. They do not want to go to 100 percent decrease in circulation because that would make a categorical change. How is the other 20 distributed . The last point i want to make on this probability is that facebook is not alone in this phenomenon of trying to deal with scale of probability. Youtube, twitter and amazon are all engaging and making somewhat argue arbitrary claims whether the network should work 80 of the time, 90 of the time, in what context . There is a struggle for a way of dealing with scale that engages with probability. To finish i want to say why does this matter . I want to come back to hacking for a minute and sort of say in the hacking there was this debate among computer scientists and philosophers, well see in the eighties and nineties that i think could be revived and be brought back forward. Hacking says what does it mean time to time come to be and disappear, such queries forces to be careful about the ideas of a possibility. What i try to do is sort of read quickly in a compressed way to say, if we see platforms and journalists as creating speech infrastructures, if we do that we can start to see some dimensions coming out of it and maybe those dimensions could be ways of thinking about regulation, or opportunities. I will stop there. Thank you. I will start apologizing by spilling coffee on the floor. I am a tshirt bode from the other campus. I was telling someone earlier today that i have been eight years since ive been to law school. Thank you for getting the downtown. Im going to talk about some things that are really going to echo a lot of what mike has said but in a much less eloquent and big picture kind of way so you can look forward to that. It does suggest that we are on the right panel and that maybe we need to be working together on some of these ideas so that is great for me. Im going to specifically throw some bombs at kind of how platforms are doing things right now and how people may think platforms are doing right now and then offer based on my own research on alternative, not an alternative, a supplement that can help in this idea of kind of combatting misinformation on social media, which is specifically user correction. The problem that we are talking about today is that the internet is terrible, specific element that im going to talk about is that theres a lot of misinformation on social media. I do not think i have to make this arent too strongly, i think people basically agree with me on that although some of the recent studies have looked at misinformation on social media is probably when you think there it is. Keep that in mind as we are talking about that. The best guess based on Empirical Research is about eight and a half percent of all posts users have shared misinformation. There is a lot to be done about this. A lot of the proposals that i have seen have been Technology Based so these are people who have technology platforms. We think the problem is technological, the skills technological. We have had misinformation forever but the difference now is that we have it is able to spread farther and faster because of the nature of technology into spreading on. As a result of that, people want technology to fix itself and fix itself with Technological Solutions as a general rule but im going to argue that there is ethical problems and empirical problems to doing that. This is uncomfortable for me because i never say the word argue when i am present to. I am very Quantitative Research and i will just see what the data says, i do not make arguments so bear with me. The first problem, im not going to spend too much time on because mike has already talked about it and lots of other people have talked about it too, which is that maybe we do want technology forms to decide what is true and what is false. This is the first big problem. To talk about this im going to use example, which is platforms have been taking a lot of action on misinformation related to vaccines. You see on the far side is pinterest, they were the first movies on this issue so you can still post whatever you want about vaccines but if you search for vaccines on pinterest you dont get pins from users, you only get pins from Certified Health organizations. Here you see the ap, which is the association of physicians, american associations physician. Twitter and facebook will follow suit on this so the same kind of thing. If you search on twitter the one of the top you will get a recommendation to go to services, if you go on facebook you will get a recommendation to go to cdc dock of. Interestingly all the platforms are recommending Different Health organizations but that is a color different thing to talk about. I think people think about this example as being the way the platforms can do this. It is easy enough to identify where there is a lot of misinformation and shut that down for users that are seeking out information. This ties back to what michael saying about what we want users to be doing if they are seeking information that is a particular behavior we want to encourage and reward with good information not that information . The idea that we can just kind of box off the stuff that people share on social media and not show to people, whether that is by downgrading an algorithm or not showing in a search results seems really appealing. The problem with this is that vaccines are really, really the exception to the rule when it comes to types of misinformation. This is from an article that just came out yesterday so check out my twitter if you want to see it. I published with my coauthor emily of the university of minnesota, which is talking about thinking about misinformation. What we are saying is there are different criteria is that we used to define what is true and what is false. To think about what misinformation is. You kind of do this without thinking about it but the more evidence there is brought to bear on the subject, so vaccines is a really example of this, there is lots of evidence. We have 100 years of evidence of the vaccines and their safety and all of those kinds of things. The kind of quality of the expertise is brought to bear, these are medical doctors that are doing the studies, we have a lot of confidence in them. All of the organizations that i just mentioned, the cdc, the hhs, all of those poll really well with the public so the public trust the cdc across party lines even. 80 of people say they trust the cdc. Same is true for organizations like the w. H. O. This is a really clear thing where all of the evidence and all of the expertise we actually mostly agree on as a society. This is that settled tiny triangle at the top, that is the vaccines example. All the other misinformation falls somewhere lower than that. Most even help researchers, which is what i mostly study, i study Health Information rather than political information, falls somewhere below the subtle line. It is more emergent, we do not have a study that says this but there is also study that says this but maybe the studies better but this one has a smaller sample size. It is really complicated to kind of synthesize all the information that we have about a particular topic. Some issues, we cant even agree on who is an expert. A really good example of that is Climate Change. You will regularly see these kind of manifesto that are signed by 1000 scientists or Something Like that but when you look at it is mostly like oil and gas scientists or Something Like that. No disrespect, im from houston, i get it. Maybe that is not the kind of export that we think should be weighing in on the issue of Climate Change. On the controversial side of things, is basically all the stuff that mike was talking about, political information is going to be controversial. The evidence is less clear as a general rule, experts are less clear as a general rule. He gets really complicated in a hurry. The vast majority of the information that we are dealing with in this ecology is not straightforward, which means it is not straightforward in dealing with. That leads me to the second problem which is that this is not an ethical problem that maybe we dont have a platform making this decision but probably they are not doing a very good job about a technologically anyways. As an example and instead of talking about it and abstract, think about whatsapp. It is already a complicated platform. It is a whole separate thing to talk about but there are 60 billion techs posted on whatsapp every day. 60 billion. Im just going to sit on that number for a second. 60 billion texts per day. Based on the study that i mentioned earlier, our best guess is that about eight and a half percent of that might be misinformation. That is probably high because the study that i am talking about said eight and a half percent of users have shared misinformation, not that eight and a half percent of the content they shared misinformation. I am being generous here. Lets say 8 of it is wrong. Lets just say that somehow, this is very unlikely because classifying is hard, Machine Learning is still a work in progress and as we just spent a long time talking about, this information is hard to define itself. Lets say they can identify misinformation with 99. 9 accuracy. Again this is very, very unlikely. You will never see these numbers especially for something as complicated as misinformation. That means 510 million pieces of information are still going to be up there even if they are achieving this Incredible Technology success rate. You might agree that this is not good enough by itself. If our concern is that misinformation exists on a platform than this is not going to solve that problem. Maybe that is not our goal and i think it is really good to think about what our goals are for these platforms but i think this is a way that it has been framed for a lot of these platforms and i think that is not going to do the trick. I am offering a People Powered solution, which is also incomplete. I want to be 100 clear about that. I think it achieves some of the goal that we have in reducing misinformation, particularly in reducing misconception which is belief and misinformation. I dont care that much about it. If there is a lot of misinformation out there and that makes them change our mind about things, that is a different thing entirely. My research focuses on trying to reduce peoples perception and specifically looking a ways to do that through social media platforms. This is an example of an experimental stimulus to use and show people. We have done this on twitter, facebook, a video platform and someone else has now replicated on whatsapp. It seems to translate to different platforms pretty well which is important. Basically what we do is we show people misinformation. The top story you see here posted by Tyler Johnson. The caption is, check out this story. This is pretty clearly misinformation. We know that mosquitoes did not create zika, it created it existed before we had genetically modified mosquitoes. This was a common misconception especially in the global southward seeker was most prominent. We tested that as a rumor and then we have someone in this case just another use your on twitter, drew miller that is saying the Scientific Consensus here that there is no relationship between gm oh mosquitoes and zika. Links to cdc before is a highly trusted health organization. We have done this as i said on different platforms, we have done with different issues, we have done with zika, we have done with generally modified foods and cancer, we have done it with raw milk, people are weird about raw milk. Misinformation, all sorts of other issues that i am happy to talk more about and it seems to be very consistent and reducing misconception. Somewhere between 20 and 30 . This is not going to change the world, it is not going to eliminate misperceptions but it is an important way that people can engage in this fear and we think it is extra important because thinking about the network to nature of social media. The feedback that we often get on this is you do not want to be drew miller correcting Tyler Johnson because tyler is going to get mad at you and it is a whole thing. You not want to get in a fight on the internet. What we emphasize is that when drew miller correct Tyler Johnson, it is not about correcting Tyler Johnson. He will get angry and get defenses and may not change his mind about the original issue. The issue is that the average facebook person has 700 followers. So 700 people, not all of them see the algorithm but some people have the ability to see these corrections happening in realtime. Same thing on twitter, the average person on twitter has 200 followers. The ability for this to spread and be seen by a lot of people is really powerful so we think it is scalable in that way and takes the homeless off the platform in a way that is ethically beneficial for deciding what is true and what is good evidence and all sorts of things. I will stop there. Thank you. Hi, i am so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for listening and being willing to travel through the rain. Today im going to be focusing on the idea that light disinfects an assertion often attributed to Supreme Court justices in 1913 although he was speaking about financial crimes, his argument that sunlight is set to be the best of disinfectants, which is shortened to becoming ubiquitous really questioning the assumption when confronting social harms like bigotry or other forms of abuse. It is hands down the most common assertion i have encountered in my work focused on the rise of White Nationalism and supremacy online in disinformation more broadly. Just because so many people say the same words does not mean they are making the same arguments. It follows two tracks with two different sets of assumptions and steaks the light of realism in the light of social justice and how i kind of came to the conversation is maybe something for question and answer but i was prompted to this by a question i did not know how to answer and i thought about it for many months in this is the result of that thinking and frightening, a lot of fighting. The light of liberalism and the light of social justice is two Different Things. Without breaking those differences down, it is in turn very difficult to dive in to focused analysis and critique of either. We need to be able to critique the effects of light or at the very least to challenge our assumptions about it. In the case of the light of liberalism and social justice, light can be good and it cant disinfectant some cases with some people. Light can also set worse things into place, light can also be the stuff of nightmares. Exploring this tension and the role Digital Tools play in deepening it helps dispensed the idea that we can take our light to the bank. All we can take to the bank is refraction. First, the light of liberalism is rooted in the enlightenment and borrows many of the indictments visual and so law symbolic motives which then itself ball rolls from the christiana be particularly coliseum. The long cultural history of light of social and spiritual corrective is all a conversation in itself. These images, these maltese include images of mirror, showing things as they are, blazing suns, bright horizons, all symbolizing truth with a capital tea. This flight tends to be aimed at the bad action itself so they hate, the abuse and the people who are perpetuated. It disinfects, at least this is the assumption by filtering those harmed through the marketplace of ideas in the process exposing hate and falsehood for what it is, a dark cloud of ignorance. Although the light of liberalism has decided pro social aims, the responsibility for burying all that light and responding responsibly to the lights of others tends to fall to individual citizens. These individual troops will go out and in an outing it will disinfect and in disinfecting will preserve our freedom censorship, which is another conversation all onto its own. The second meaning an implicit argument of light disinfect a lies with social justice activism and tends to focus on those affected by hate. These images, the quote is from the anti lynch activist and this quoted featured in the pages of the museum book for the Legacy Museum in montgomery, alabama which focuses on the history of lynching and the legacy of slavery in the United States. This flight disinfect by inviting others to bear witness to the effective parties first person subjective experiences of pain. Seeing these effects, a collective process of truth and reconciliation can begin. It is worth noting that the light of social justice does not presume, that the marketplace of ideas will filter the best ideas to the top. Instead it implicitly concedes that the most resident and popular ideas are often the ones in most need of challenging. For example, the widespread prevalence and in many cases acceptance of lynching in the post reconstruction south. That was very popular. Another divergence from the light of liberalism is that rather than for grounding the individuals composing society, the light of social justice for grounds to society comprising individuals, a society whose unjust norms structures and hierarchies must change if theres any hope for individual citizens actions to change. The light of social justice thus hails the collective we. Its view of freedom is positive as something worth pursuing for the good of the collective rather than negative freedom from external restriction. Both kinds of light pose challenges in a fine context and here is a very quick snapshot. The light of liberalism assumes that the marketplace of ideas is a rational, cultural process, it is not. In assumes people make decisions solely because a facts, we dont. It assumes me most basically it works but history tells a more complicated story. While in my disinfect for some, overall it amplifies or certainly can amplify and has amplified and help proliferate the spread of hate. Same with the light of social justice. There are also challenges there. The we who looks can be deeply fractured and this fracture can result deeply unpredictable effects. Not everyone responds to even the most righteous lights equally. The emergency claims, so the idea of this thing, whatever it is is terrible and cannot be allowed to persist can fail. When the emergency fail claims it can result in hardening the ideology of those doing the harming, in other words it can backfire. The idea of an emergency claim and what happens when it fails is a concept for individual culture scholar. A third challenge is of the light of social justice. Victims can be abstracted, reframing threatened black and brown bodies and particular as mere set pieces for mostly white education or even entertainment. That idea is from black literary scholar debra walker king. That can be dehumanizing, fantasizing and normalizing of hegemonic injustice and its own right. The take away here is that the light of liberalism in the light of social justice are different, they should be analyzed on their own terms. They do have something fundamental in common however and that is what a mess digital spaces and tools make both. Racing all kinds of complications about how and when and where and if to shine even our most righteous flight. There is one basic reason for why this is the case. Online predicting an audiences response, even identifying where one audience ends another begins isnt just difficult, it can be downright impossible by network design. Social sharing spurred on by trending topic algorithms, by streamlined retweeting and reporting functions and by the various attentions of economy ensures that audiences online remain hopelessly collapsed. Within these networks overlaid on top of networks, a person might shine their light notably, a steady beam cutting through the darkness. However pure that my light be, however focused, its reception is in fact pragmatic. Reflecting widely on each network twist and turn. Its colors change, its wavelength length and it can never be called back. It holds a mirror up to society to reveal its ugliest contours, the light of liberalism is particularly vulnerable to out of control reflection online. The funhouse mirror, that is the marketplace of ideas, only strange that life, bending it towards a worse and we are outcome. Most presently because there is no singular marketplace of ideas online. There are ideologically sided marketplaces, particularly on the far right thanks to the process of asymmetric polarization and financial incentives structures rewarding increasingly radicalized content, which is another conversation all onto itself. The result of this ideological siloing is that a scathing critique spotlighted by the light of liberalism can filter into a reactionary marketplace and emerge, transform as a joke or justification or incentive to doing something even worse next time. Digital spaces also pose complications for the light of social justice as necessary as the light might be, on line it is its potential benefits that are matched by potential fall outs. Most basically, context collapse audiences online allow bigots to weaponize very easily. This is evidence by the fact that for example the Legacy Museum has disabled all his comments on youtube. The goal of fostering a meaningful dialog about the legacy of slavery is outweighed by the danger of providing bigots a platform to add their to racist sense. Also vexing is a fact that social sharing of harm, even when the purpose of that cheri is to trigger restored of justice frequently dove tails into worse abuse and harassment. This is terrible and we cannot let this persist online. Both a critical assertion to make and a target sign. Are titillating the differences between a light of liberalism in the light of social justice, an effort that the gun with a seemingly simple question, who and what am i shining my light on is a basic way to identify way where the potential hazards late and what the ambivalent consequences of our light might be. Such a focus in turn cultivates more strategic ecologically sensitive approaches, spotlight online. Here, ecological refers to the reciprocal interconnection between our networks, our tools and ourselves. Apply to how and where and when we shine our light, ecological thinking director attention to the out there. To unexpected places and unintended weeds. It affirms the value of wanting to rid the world of the scours of bigotry, wanting to protect an empowered group, wanting to defend democracy with all our might at the same time. It reminds us gently that intentions are outcomes, especially online as so much information zooms across and between so Many Networks with so many uncertainty about what happens next. We must be in the world where we are in, not one, a top our sanctions. Living bravely in our world mean supplying strategic case by Case Assessment of the costs and benefits of light and also darkness. It means acknowledging that our light can be weapons for some even as it is a necessary beacon for others and never growing too comfortable, parsing which is which. It means most important of all, respecting the power we hold in our hands and making peace with the fact that when it comes to light there are no easy answers. Thank you. Im the last one. We are going to have fun. I work for buzzfeed, thats even more fun. I am a Senior Reporter for Buzzfeed News where i do a lot of we are things on the internet. I basically hoover up information from the social web to better understand how we interact with one another, sometimes a badge of people into giving the or donating their data so they can better understand how they experience the social web and oftentimes i will look at terrible systems that govern our lives every day, whether it is policies or algorithms. When it comes to my role in this top, i am very much someone who is going to talk about systems that governs how we consume information. There has been a lot of talk about fake news or bad information, misinformation in general that puts the owners on our understanding whether something is good or bad. For me it is a lot about the social dynamics that come into play and how we consume information online. The three ideas that i want to set forward in my paper are, understanding how algorithmic we powered segregation works. Oftentimes i would also like to look at information that is always socially and emotionally contextualize. We dont just read news in a newspaper that sits in front of us, we read it constantly contextualize by the person who poses it or the emotional reaction that the context elicits. I would love for you to start thinking about information consumption as a performer of act, not just as something you do for yourself to enrich yourself and become more politically informed. I want you to understand these three ideas through three interesting stories that we were able to do a buzzfeed and i would like to say that buzzfeed was one of the few places that took the internet seriously before anyone else did. We were able to have people on deck who have been sitting at four channels before six or seven years before everyone else understood that that was a terrible place to be. Sorry whitney, you are part of that to. I would like after introducing those three contacts, i would like for you to think about how it has changed a political imagination. A term of understanding. What is considered extreme and what is considered politically popular, is very different depending on which information you have. Thats start with something fun. This is Catherine Cooper and you will have to look at things because buzzfeed works with visuals. This is Catherine Cooper, she is a conservative mother and lindsey linda, these are two wonderful human beings who share their Facebook News feeds with us because we wanted to better understand how to people who are politically different were experiencing information and how maybe algorithmic lee distorted realities were making their relationships worse than they should be. One of the things that we were able to find was just looking at different kind of posts. I think we got 2367 posts from each of the news feeds. You swollen scroll and scroll and at the bottom it says theres no more stories. Sometimes it also promises you to get more friends so you have more stories. We were able to look at classifying the content by posts of their friends, ads but also political content and use. These were two very different ways of understanding politics. These are two different means on the left side you have a liberal meme. And on the right side you have sort of another meme that looks apricot bomb a. This was in 2017 we did this experiment. Look at the three stooges, i think, i might be dating myself here. That was an interesting understanding of the humor and pro formatively that goes around understanding and experiencing politics these days. When politicians nowadays kind of interact with the audiences, they still believe that we take them at face value but everything has been remixed in this area of the internet. What we see and who we see is no longer just someone giving you information about reforms or about their platforms. It is always contextualize. What is also interesting is that leticia bode talked about the number of followers and we have the number of people we are friends with, a number of people who make up the inventory of our content, who we are friends with are the people who produce the content that could potentially be part of our information universe. Id like to introduce to you the concept of the tyranny of the loudest. Algorithms feed in or taken data that you give them. These are the two different news feeds ranked by friends, not by News Institutions that were showing up the most on these two womens news feed. On the left you see lindsey linder. I guess she is in her twenties and she works in criminal justice in august. You can see shes friends with a lot of lawyers. The person who showed up the most on her news feed is very small, might not be able to see it, is the aclu regional director. Afterwards is a friend from seattle, a lawyer, another lawyer, a friend from back home, another front philosophy will so you can start to get a feeling whatever information universe might be like. Guess what, the aclu regional director is probably one of the loudest voice is there. He probably poses the most. Probably posts more than another friend who may no longer working law or Something Like that. Not only is there more inventory from this one person to potentially be showing up, this persons content might also be soliciting a lot more extreme emotions and we can talk about that in a second, that then buoy that information. For Katherine Cooper who was a mom, was never left that small place where she grew up. The person who posts and shows the most is a lifelong school friend, followed by a mothers friend, her daughters best friend, not even her best friend and then the best guy from 50 years and so you start to understand that the people we are surrounded by start making up our information universe. If we are to believe studies, a lot more people are getting their information from the social web. Political information in particular as well as news. I work at a News Organization, our industries dying, to supporters. I think one of the things that is really important to understand within this context as well is that facebook all of the facebook, twitter, instagram, a lot of the social networks are engineered for maximizing Data Collection and profit. One of the reasons why facebook is one of the most highest ipo in that history at that point in time is because it has longitudinal behavioural data overtime. What is also interesting is that it does not measure new wants. Think of the kinds of emotions that facebook measures. Wows, angrys, sad, likes, and loves maybe. These are not going to measure someone going away after reading an article and thinking deeply about something. We are not here to measure quality of information consumption, we are here to measure emotional reaction to that and if thats the data that feeds back into what then services on your news feed than what you have is only content or probably mostly content thats elicits very strong conversations last emotional reaction right. So that is one of the things that i think is important to understand because that may take existing a differences politically and really push them further and further and par and suddenly we have people who start may be following a trump website, there is an atlantic article that starts off with someone starting a new facebook account and just looking at liking the trump pages and trying to see what kind of information would be coming out of that kind of algorithmic experiment and i think once we start understanding that algorithms distort or as whitney was saying introduce a mere fact into what i gates attention and what does and we start understanding that information segregation has become even worse through the algorithmic content surfacing, does that make sense . Okay we move on. Another thing that id like to bring about the tyranny, really well shown in this animated gift, thank you buzzfeed, a live stream on fox news pages i think Donald Trumps very First Press Conference as president and you notice here a lot of emotions, the emotions are also again segregated, like on the right side fusion i guess you could classify as more left leaning, you see a lot of angry faces that are floating across the screen and then on the left side you see a lot of yes good job and a lot of hearts and likes and so on and i think that really starkly illustrates just how differently we experience the exact same information, this was a live stream of a press conference, no editorializing nothing else around it was just him speaking into the camera and suddenly we are positive with the idea like do we agree with the hundreds of other people who either agree or disagree with donald trump or not, we cant just taken the information anymore suddenly we opposed, we are put into a position to have to react rather than just take the information and make up our own minds about this, all right and then last but not least one of the things that i want people to understand is that taking information has become very pro formative and one of these stories that we did about aoc for example was to better understand how political adherents is performed on a line, its not very different from how we perform our fandom s around captain america for example, make fan fiction about political figures because now more than ever our consumption of information and our sharing of information has become a way for us to demarcate us politically, right, so this is fandom are around aoc we scraped, or we looked at more than 40 gigabytes worth of information for this and we are able to look into the common themes about that and then this is aoc on the right side and how she is being dehumanized in certain ways looking like i guess a trash can monster and the other ones but i think one of the things that i want to show you through that is that we now live in parallel universes, sometimes i would invite you to look at the polar opposite of the political spectrum and start experiencing press conference through the streams of those may be very extreme facebook groups just to get a bit of understanding of how maybe that was political imaginations are completely separate from years. I think that is what happened in the election 2016 people were like how did this happen, we all lived in very different and secondary segregate information universes, i think now its time to really find ways to combat that and figure out a way to balance out peoples mediates diets as well. , yes, thank you. So thanks to all of, you have given me so many good threads to pick up on, but it would not surprise you by saying anna start about talking about journalism and talking about the press, so you all either explicitly or implicitly you talked about who some of the actors responsible for information pollution are and i think wed agree that there are many and at the issue is really systemic. Interesting lee in a poll that the Key Research Center published last summer there respondents felt that they thought political leaders and activist groups were most responsible for i will use some air quotes creating made up news and information and that same poll however most of the responded so that they felt the news media was the party most responsible for cleaning that up and putting aside the problematic nature of the term and whether the question may have been a little eating, i want to ask you how much can we responsibly lean on a journalist right now who to my mind are working harder and longer under more difficult conditions with more harassment than perhaps ever in american journalism and im also wondering if the press has, is contending with institutional flaws and maybe flaws of process arch as lack of diversity as an example as an institutional fall or sciences him as it has been called in terms of process that may make it poorly equipped to be the player to i will use the word fix this kind of issue, i dont know if there is someone who wants to take that offers or should i go right to my left, whitney. Actually yeah so one of the things that prompted reflecting on the effects was the fact that i was seeing different people saying it but they meant Different Things where they were referring to Different Things but the difference hadnt been articulated clearly and what i have found most commonly within journalism there are some exceptions to this, this is what prompted the thinking but the most common kind of light they get shined with an establishment media, news media is a light of liberalism this assumption that you shine the light on the, bigot you shine a light on the terrible thing and then that is going to be the way that you disinfect it and because it also tends to, not always but tends to track with whiteness, you have folks that are working in newsrooms for whom racism is an abstract idea or its something to read an article about but its not something that is lived, something very easy to shine a particular light to write about the nazi next door because youre just thinking about, if i hold this mirror up to society that is going to solve it and the problem and sort of a failure to consider how it is that light ends up working for factoring and creating a more unsafe the world for people who are a target of these bigots, so there is a lot of reflection ironically i guess about how do i show how terrible this is and very little reflection about how does this impact bodies that are different than mine and so i think that that conversation and why, how do certain lights get let more than others its a fundamental conversation about diversity and it isnt the case at all reporters of color are you know shining a different kind of light but you do see differences and for example and this was the case that prompted my thinking, during the summer of racist president ial tweets when trump told the squad to go back you did see a difference in how different kinds of journalists responded and the white journalists tended to shine the camera on trumps face, the crowd, send them, back send them back and then reporters of colors not to the letter but often there was a pattern of reporters who had more of an embodied investment in that racism who experience people telling them to go back, those stories today to go back and the target of that racism. So that got me thinking about within journalism like gets shined on a different way but you have disproportionate kinds of light because you have disproportionate kinds of people with certain assumptions about the value of the lights they shine. So i think theyre fundamentally tethered to diversity and i think thats why there needs to be more folks in newsroom so theres not a monopoly on the light and the challenges that lie causes. Yeah, thank you very much, i echo what whitney had said and i come back to this one example and its from a while ago but the l. A. Times had a moment where they decided to stop allowing letters to the editor that deny the existence of Climate Change and it was for a News Organization, that was a pretty big deal and i was just in the letters to the editor it wasnt in their main news page and it sticks with me as sort of one of these examples where i think, one is to say news and journalism is a very big space im often really hesitant to talk about what journalism is or what news is because it can be so varied. But that was a moment for me where there was a risk that was taken because it was even before maybe, theres a dominant view that Climate Change now a real thing, but the l. A. Times said no im gonna take a stance and do it. I think about that instance, i think about what were the conditions, what led to them being able to do that and one is sort of i think journalists being embedded in some of the broader social movement and pattern so its knowing the culture that youre into the l. A. Times can say well its not that big of a risk but were close enough to it and the other is that this was letters to the editor so it was not the main news coverage, they were talking about the relationship to the audience it is about educating the audience but then i also think about, i come back to the notion of this marketplace model of journalism which is dominant in this country for sure and i think it leads to a lot of things that winning was saying and i think about how could there be better runways or better safer context for journalists to take some of those risks like saying Climate Change is a thing and were not gonna allow the denial of it in our pages, what kind of installations or what kind of safety nets can be provided to News Organizations to let them do that to let them actually make some choices that are very different from the choices of the penny press in the 18 forties and we are kind of stuck in this economic model of saying dont offend an. Audience because that audience is a potential revenue generator, and i think i come back to funding i come back to giving journalists a safety net to be able to make choices i think they actually want to make and do Something Like that can i ask the only journalist of color here and practicing fulltime journalist speak about that i think one of the thing that can be one of the frustrating thing is we do a lot of this work and im gonna speak space specifically about buzzfeed and i worked at various other institutions and i can speak about the fact that distribution levels, distribution issues have really turned a lot of the work that people do to come back misinformation kind of into something that doesnt reach its audiences and like we have for example experts in misinformation, jane for example does a lot of breaking news combatting false threats and hoaxes online and yes she reaches shirt folks on twitter but thats not gonna reach the majority of folks. I think that work exists and i think a lot of institutions are doubling down on that right now, if you look at a lot of thunders they are giving a lot of money to what is combatting this information. I think fundamentally the work is there and i think politifact is a wonderful institution thats also showing that there has been this work for a long time it just hasnt been reaching the right like the plumbing has not done the right kind of job of getting that or has made it very difficult to bring that information to folks. To go back to the funhouse mirror affect our attention is not singularly on and evenly balanced home page anymore our attention is this weird magnifying glass that goes from one tied to another and if you look at anything that happened last year and particularly reaching a Pivotal Point of absolute compassion you can give people all the information you want, we are doing that i would say in argue that we have the people who have been sitting at 4chan and ive been doing these articles who have been not just covering it as news that takes it from one place to another but also explains exactly how these systems are broken and not good for a larger Civic Society i think the Biggest Issue is there is a need for a briefing that information to folks and be also figuring out how they can receive it in the right mindset when youre looking at any or just ask anyone on how many taps they have open look into people experiencing anything from lets say the border crisis to the ways in which impeachment has been covered is just a barrage of information that again has too much on one thing all at the same time and then moves on to the next thing that would drive anyone and say and i think that is the part where we talked about this there is a lot of confusion about what we are supposed to Pay Attention to and what we are supposed to have compassion with and then constantly being in this glass cage of a motion of what social media has broad has become a really exhausting process and has debilitated a lot of people from doing the basic thing is this good information or bad, because we are constantly push in a position to react and as someone who sometimes you know we have to do breaking news events and we are being sent in deployed into the field we tweet first and then someone in the headquarters takes those tweets and put some together and someone who works at a News Organization that is on the internet all the time i think for us it has become a big problem of like we have a very strong audience. A very particular audience but we can only reach so many people, its kind of like a mosaic of News Institution how do you make it a holistic process. Briefly i think a lot of good points have been raised going back to your religious question its not fair to as journalism to be responsible for this and i do think that the results are misleading when you phrase it has made up news people think about news in a particular way politicians make news right they do things that are important thats why they say its the politicians fault also we like blaming politicians for things and media gives us news so its their problem to fix it so i think thats a large part of it but even thank you beyond that i think we cant expect the public to know how to fix this we study this stuff for a living and we still dont hundred percent know how to fix it so i think thats a little unfortunate i understand why you asked that question but im not relying on the public to figure out how to fix this problem. But journalists are doing exactly what theyre supposed to be doing, they are producing that information, they are making it available to people, i think there are broader systematic things and i think there is a really large Public Opinion element of this of how do we shift that blame or that responsibility so that its not just thinking about what can the news media do to fix this but who else is responsible is that regulation, the public, i think there are a lot of factors that need to be held accountable. Does anyone else want to weigh in and then im gonna go to the audience. Yes to that point about intentionality i think it matters not, i think thats the crux of some of the confusion, to some of the problems we have with the spread of mist and disinformation, when we talk about the difference between misinformation and disinformation is when its deliberately spread, you cant always parse out online but we are still talking about why is someone spread something, so there is the sense of pointing the blame somehow outwards. Externally and that if our intentions are good if we want to help in china mirror if we want to write an article about the nazi next door because we just think nazis or bad then we are off the hook. Whether we are journalists or individual citizens but the way that information travels online algorithms dont care what your intentions are a it cares that you are engaging with something so as long as we are framing it as who is getting it wrong we are less likely to start asking how our own actions feeding into these polluted information flows without asking or realizing. It the reporters that rely on the light of liberalism their intentions are good they want to do their best they are using the tools that they have at their disposal you know they are relying on the assumptions that they have always made that makes sense to make let the marketplace of ideas sorted on all out and they are coming at it from a very good perspective but just because you are doesnt mean that youre not gonna and then inadvertently open the window because now you have all these articles about all these nazis that youve handed microphones to to plead their case. And so until we started shifting how we understand intention, blame, responsibility then we are only ever going to be pointing our fingers and other people when we are all part of this process, we are all part of and contribute to this ecology that means producing pollution even when all we want to do is help i just want to put into that there are those discussions that are happening in newsroom and i helped administer things for people of color across the country, there is a lot of us who do that work and other folks who are editors who have talked about that particular article and theyre trying to change you know its not as clear and simple as we didnt intend that in our gonna walk away from that. Thats definitely not it and i know that as the story has shifted to it also being about media 2016 has fundamentally not just, it turned media into information i think more editors are starting to think deeply about how they phrase what words they used and what they choose to cover so i would say its a lot more nuanced than just liberal white journalists going after or portraying not sees in a sympathizing way i think there is a lot more, there have been internal conversations that i cannot divulge entirely that i have seen happen over and over again about whether the to published the name of a shooter not for example that has happened where the whistleblower whose name was not published and may have been published before there has been a lot of conversation in newsrooms and now we dont always get it right but i think its a lot more complicated than what it sounds like its definitely complicated and its Getting Better i think that in some ways there has been some improvements 2016 because more people are asking these kinds of questions but i do think still that there is often this assumption that journalists but not just journalists everyday people who also spread misinformation that there is an outside where we can stand that if we are calling attention to a hoax to condemn in or to call attention to it being false we are not contributing to the spread of that hoax anytime we engage with anything that is the ambivalence that is the complication so in the work that i do with journalists and following charlottesville in particular and still something that folks talk about there is an increasing awareness of being in it. But not really knowing what to do when you are in it and i have found that depending on what your Life Experiences are that your maybe more or less likely to think about those nuances as opposed to i stand outside its the view from nowhere and then the people realize that something is problematic but youre absolutely right there is tons and tons of nuance but every day people do this to that if im calling attention to how races and terrible somebody is that is going to convince someone that racism is somehow bad and maybe that does for your immediate circle but that can still spread that information and entrenched into other audiences, im gonna let the audience weigh in now and if you have a question go to microphone if you cant reach a microphone for some reason raise your hand and we will get to you introduce yourself and speak into the microphone i appreciated thanks my names walt im a retired federal contractor and i got involved in the internet back when it was a place where everyone knew your name and now to call it a hellish landscape might be sugar coating it i think two of our panelists have affiliations with wired magazine and i think andy greene word described very fittingly the spectators of rampaging through cyberspace sowing chaos and confusion and i met a loss to see how the United States is going to respond to that threat thank you anyone want to weigh in is your question along the lines of it seems like a hopelessness situation where do we begin . I think greenberg sets an example he is gone very deep into the threat and set a very coherent timeline into what has happened in where it might go and i think thats an excellent example for journalism in general but it is very expensive its very time consuming he spent years working on that project who can afford it but your question is, well who can afford it it is expensive we invest and things we care about and i think where the money gets spent matters to, its really important to have conversation specifically about the institution of journalism but when i think about if i had money that i could just throw at the problem i dont know if i would start with journalism and i dont know if i would start with technology so figuring out where do some of these assumptions come from how is it that young people are raised to not just interact online but interact off line to how do we teach a more holistic understanding of the world so that people can interact in a more holistic way its not just that facebook but i guess theyre not on facebook but its not just Digital Media sets people up to star compartmentalizing indeed contextualizing thats a process that happens off line to how do we intervene or set young people up so they can better navigate these challenges that they are going to be inheriting so yes where the money gonna come from but thats where i worse start if it were me, and to be honest i used to volunteer for an Organization Called the News Literacy project. They used to go to school in teach categorization of information what is the primary source and so on so i think what is fundamentally lacking is people taking the time to take this step back and that their Critical Thinking kick, and i think we have been very condition to emotionally react to a lot of information nowadays, i think if that were something that i would do i would love to figure out a to put a button somewhere that delays are gratification to that you dont just like share, so you dont just engage with the content but actually have to read it. Secondly to really bring programs like that to schools, like i also volunteer at high schools every once in a while i see that a lot there is not a confusion theres a web savviness that happens with that but i think theres confusion about that content that kids are looking at in particular and these are kids at a teach how to code so half the time they understand the infrastructure but i think it is really the content of how to critically approach them. Hi im david jaime privacy expert i originally with look teaches thing, oh little broader, you said what youre suggesting is people power corrections and you had someone post that falls thing about zika being spread by gmo mosquitoes and then someone posted a correction, how does that empower true corrections over false corrections of someone comes in posts something about like post something true then i mean certainly someone will post a link and say authoritatively no this expert disagree tower we empowering true things are false things. Similarly you said the l. A. Times letters nine climbing change, so they did this before the strong consensus on the issue, you didnt say exactly when, it seems to me that also isnt necessarily privilegeing accuracy its perhaps, i mean that could just as well and up setting in stone something that doesnt bear out, how can you make sure that your methods are favoring true results over false ones . Thanks for the question i appreciated and im hearing something quite deep in what youre asking that i think itll be good to pull out i think and i found this when i was talking to the facebook facts occurs in the people working there, its a very professory answer but underlined is this answer what do you mean by a true and i know thats a very abstract concept, i think for the l. A. Time example, they were actually doing something very interesting and i dont think journalists often do in an explicit way i think they often do it implicitly but they are basically saying there was Scientific Consensus about Climate Change, there was not yet they were saying social consensus or culturals consensus, they were making the distinction about when does one truth claim dominate in a particular type of culture so they were outlining themselves with a cultural location of truth making and they are saying we are going to align ourselves with the scientists so one is sort of a position themselves to the culture, that was totally stand and now is an interesting one for journalists to take because they did acknowledge that we are not standing from nowhere this is the idea that the truth claims you make is from where you are and the second bit is they were sort of taking this pragmatist view of truth it is a very big move to make an and said were not gonna talk about whether this is true or not true we are more interested in investing in the consequences of that claim being considered to be true broadly and that is denying this in that but that is what we are interested in contributing to a world in which Climate Change is not being denied that is where we are gonna put our stake so one is to say lets look at a landscape of cultures how theyre making different claims they line with the scientists the other say we are interested in the consequences of that claim being considered true and we are gonna try to help it by using our position as a news were gonnas asian to give it legitimacy but it was really a moment of situateing a truth cream and relating to a cultural and consequence. That is what they were doing at that moment and that is a risky interesting move and i certainly think Climate Change is happening but if it werent then trying to push that it is would be actively harmful, yes and that is the messy place that we are in. They were taking a stance and i think that is a normal move and that is an interesting move but thats what journalists do, they take stances. Yeah its a really important question something that ive been doing Research Since 2014 and we were worried about this so we tested it its not published but i can tell you that essentially information processes work the same whether it is a false story being debunked or whether it is a true story being debunked with falseness assuming that the truth story and the fall story are equally implausible so that is something that is very concerning to us and what mitigates my concern is empirically, so we have this study out of the uk that looks at people Self Reporting if they share information that the leader found out of was wrong where they knew at the time was wrong return things like that and then it also asks them if anyone called them out, essentially people corrected them on social media and about 40 to said they share false information said they werent corrected and only 5 said they never shared it and someone tried to cuddle quote direct them, so empirically didnt seem like it happens that much but to the extent that it does it should have the same outcome, so when we think about shifting Public Opinion and behaviors i think thats an important part of the question, how to encourage people to do this not from an evil perspective for a lack of a better way to put it. So i would like to get one more question it looks like we have one more person waiting in about five minutes left. Hi everyone im a second year law student and i worked in this for a number of years, so thank you all for coming, these were fascinating presentations and i have many questions but ill keep it to one, regarding the last presentation and the graphs that you showed about the distribution of number of posts for the liberal individuals, the conservative individual, i cannot help but notice that those were very differently shaped, so on coopers news feed there is actually like a lot more people who have a much higher volume of coasts compared to news feed im also curious is that something you guys are planning to interrogate, like the balance about who is allowed us, its not only who is allowed us but also what are the other off line conditions that are leading to the shape of that curve for a conservative individual versus the liberal individual and what are the broader things that may suggest about their information universe. We will be really nice to do that, one of the things it is difficult about these individuals trying to extrapolate that for multiple people is even. Morris i think one of the hardest things what we try to do is an adversarial experiment, we try to elise reverse engineer how they may weigh certain things, even facebook and they have an explainer about how that algorithm works and its still not enough to draw strong conclusions between maybe you can find cool relations between why there is more of a balanced sort of distribution of people on their verses this one but yeah, i could probably do it. I guess the other thing im thinking just looking at that, like what does that suggest about folks who fall into that bucket versus folks who might fall into the liberal bucket and the platform and lynda or i think there is a lot on their to dig into. So one of the things that i want to say get out of this, its very individualistic, its very much of an emblematic example rather than something you can use, and if you want to do it im down to do it, and i think its that interesting. It could be great to. Id like to thank all of our guests and wrap up, thank you. applause he returned to that event at georgetown law, to hear the