Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion Focuses On Fake News 20170205

Now the head of facebooks news feed, the founder of craigslist and a panel of journalists and academics discuss the effect of consumers and the media. This is about 90 minutes. Let. We had a distinguished panel. We hav, right here to my left, the first panelist here is laura seidel laura sydell. Or willany of you heard onten to her amazing story disinfomedia, one of the stories that really brought this to light in my mind. That aired for the first time last september and has been viewed many times since. Adam mosseri, we are very happy to have someone high up with the newsfeed of facebook. Adam manages the team responsible for delivering relevant content, news content, for those relevant 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. Us. Ave Craig Newmark with craig is a web pioneer, the founder of craigslist. It is a speaker and who also you often introduces himself modestly as a news consumer. He can also claim to be one of the internets bestknown nerds. All of this comes right out from his own selfdescription. He recently generously donated 1 million to the Poynter Institute to promote verification, Fact Checking in journalism. Craigh as anyone i know, has taken steps to address the problem. Joined by two members of the uc berkeley faculty as well. Is a Law School Professor in the codirector of berkeley laws samuelson law, technology, and Public Policy clinic. She specializes in First Amendment and media issues, all about censorship and what you can and cannot do. Mackiemason is the University Librarian and a presser and a professor at the school of information. He focuses on online behavior, Digital Information and distribution. Finally, our moderator is dean edward wasserman. He is the dean of the graduate school of journalism and his specialty is media ethics. He blogs, perhaps appropriately media. Alled on social unsocial media. I want to thank you, the audience. Ed thank you all for coming out tonight on this chilly evening. [applause] a i want to also welcome number of reporters and the audience from reuters, New York Times, the daily californian. We have a strong Interdisciplinary Panel here tonight, and thank you all for participating. We have roughly an hour and a half to play with. I figured he would divide it approximately in half. About 45 minutes with a discussion on the panel. I hoping for a lively discussion, not necessarily an orderly one. Youre welcome to interrupt each other to move the conversation along. I will be tossing out questions and goading you when i am not happy with your answers. So, wefter 45 minutes or will open the floor to questions. Opening the floor, as was observed at a talk about long ago, seismically active california. Let me kick this off with an opening thought. I was thinking back to when i was getting interested in the earlyin the late 1960s, 1970s, a great deal of very excited and very much utopian talk about the world of democratized discourse that the media would enable. If you had told me that that 40, 50 years hence, i would have this device that would give me access to bigger audiences and the widest circulating then the widest circulating newspaper on earth had, and give me more information and the best source reporter on earth had, i would say, that sounds like paradise. That sounds like what would be a democratized communications sphere looks like, where people are enabled. Instead, here we are. We are finding that there is a dark underside to that. We are finding, when we look around, that people that more people believe things that are not true then perhaps ever before, and more people are acting on beliefs that they either misunderstand or understand arent true than ever before. We find that this wondrous world , the technologically enabled communications paradise, has now turned around and is biting itself in the backside. And westart by asking are finding more people than ever enthralled by the shadows on the cave. What do we do . I am going to invite laura sydell to weigh in on it to get started. Fake news has become a big, messy topic. It is being brandished as an allpurpose slogan to discard everything from to describe everything from errors to deliberate falsehoods. It is no longer agreed upon as identifying a unitary phenomenon. What conclusions can we draw about the way the term is now being fought over and the elastic way it is being applied . Laura i guess i want to say there is a difference of intent. There is a big difference. People who are in the fake news business, they know what they are doing. They know it is fake. As opposed to a journalist who is trying to get it right makes a mistake. I would argue, for example, some people say that judith millers reporting on the weapons of mass destruction was fake news. It wasnt. She made a horrible mistake. But the guy that deirdre mentioned, this is fake news, that is profitable. We decided we would take one story within a meeting and i got the assignment to take one story and trace it all the way back. In this case, it was the story dad and hadent apparent fbi agent dead in an apparent murder suicide, and supposedly this fbi agent had been investigating Hillary Clintons emails. If you know something about the all right conspiracy theories about the clip the altright conspiracy theories about the clintons, they murder people often. This appeared on a site called the Denver Guardian, which appears to be a reputable site but is not. Was initially not that easy to find because usually you can dy, and discover that there is a website, somebody owns the domain name. I hired somebody to basically look at the internet a bit like a paleontologist. He was eventually able to get me a name, and address. I decided the best thing to do is go knock on his door. It turned out he was in huntington beach, california. I had no idea what we would find. Male intern with me because i was a little nervous. We went to his door and there he was. I knocked on the door and said, did you write this . He said no. He closed the door in our faces. It turns out he is an npr fan. Seriously. He gets back to us and says, all right, i will talk to you. Yes, i do own the Denver Guardian website. In his case, he was a Hillary Clinton supporter too. He said he started this whole thing is kind of a joke. He wanted to show how crazy the altright wise and how easy it was to spread fake news in the altright echo chamber. However, as i did point out to him, it was lucrative. He told me he was making between 10,000 and 30,000 a month. He had a whole bunch of other websites, too, where he was putting this stuff out there. It was absolutely intentional. That denverbout guardian story was totally false and we knew it was totally false. That is fake news. I really do think there is a big difference between a reporter making a mistake and what this gentleman was doing. Topic, i would say that i feel like one of the things that is going on is a sense of wanting to make everybody confused. I think that works in some peoples advantage, to have the world be confusing. I have heard people talk about inve bannons interest certain far right groups in europe and russia who do use this tactic. Is, but iot saying he think it is something to think about, what is it about and what is its intent . Ed i want to come back to how you make money with fake news. First, you have identified a clear case of deliberate tablet deliberate fabrication. The term is being applied more broadly for an underlying dissatisfaction with the quality of information people are getting. It is playing to the political arena in somewhat unforeseen ways. I wonder what sense would make of that . Jeffrey i dont disagree with what she said but i would say, it is more about information distribution and people wanting to get information out there as providers and people wanting to take information as consumers, it is often you often useful to think about quality. There is highquality news, lowquality news or information. It is a spectrum. There is some negative quality news. There are some situations where people are intentionally manipulating. Even then, there is a little bit more nuanced. In the case you just described, it was a lark and he was making money on it. It didnt sound like he was trying to persuade people to change behavior. But sometimes, people are trying to manipulate. There is a malevolent intent. It, especially if you are a platform provider, you care about the quality of the news or the information that is being distributed on your platform. You want more good quality because you want more people to come to your platform, and you want less bad quality. That spectrum is hard to draw any lines on. Sometimes Platform Providers want Different Things with their consumers. , and ast want eyeballs long as they can attract eyeballs, they are selling those two advertisers. On the other hand, they want repeat eyeballs. If they keep delivering bad information, they will not get repeat eyeballs. In thinking about how to Design Systems and understand behavior in this business, first i like to think about it as a spectrum of quality with certain special cases, where sometimes it is not just lowquality but negative or malicious quality. Ed you are not suggesting quality is driving the traffic . Jeffrey to some extent. People want the information for different reasons. Some people just want information for entertainment. I think, and repeated use, there is a correlation between quality and what is driving the traffic. People are going to recognize that certain sources are more reliable than others. The content provider wants to develop a significant business and keep that going, and will care about that quality. Just to interject one thing, what part of the problem is facebook. It is an environment where youre looking at all kind of things we things that your friends share. You are in an environment that feels comfortable and safe. That is part of the issue is that you are not now go into all these separate, credible publications. I am just acting as a news consumer, i just want to have news i can trust. These are tough problems. One part of it is trolling and harassment. I have been trying to deal with that on a professional basis for 20 years. The platforms have been taking steps to address this, it is just really tough. Facebook is working with the international Fact Checking network and are trying to work with people who are signatories to that agreement with political act and snopes. Google is working with the trust project, which is about means by which news organizations can say, here is what is trustworthy behavior. It is about having a code of ethics and being serious about it. Ive spoken with twitter directly about the problem of dealing with trolling and harassment. These are really tough problems. The platforms are standing up to them. Hopefully, in the near future, i will debut i will be able to announce with wikipedia new steps and funding to deal with harassment and trolling. The platforms are standing up, but these are really old, tough problems to deal with. Last week, somebody reminded me from ake news attack roman who faked something from mark antony because he wanted to raise support to go after mark antony and cleopatra. Want to figure out how you talk about it. You want to be quiet about how you talk about it because the bad guys are listening to what you are saying. You will see it pop up in black hat discussion boards. You dont want to leak stuff until you are ready to do something. Ed i take your point that it is not new. But what has changed . Swiftboate had the 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. Ofh side accused the other proffering phony, fake news. What has changed now . What is different in the news environment now in 2004 . Catherine i think some parts of it are new, some parts of it are old. Gullible people are timeless. Anyone who has email and two has received a forward from a relative understands this. It is hard to get those things to stop. Of the things that are new here are the platforms and the ease with which someone can create a new story which, although it may sound fantastical to many of us, appeals to people a trump supporter may be inclined to believe things that enhance a particular narrative, and you can easily create something that enhances that narrative. I think the speed with which that can happen is something that is new. We dont have the same gateway to controlling the media as we traditionally had. Ed adam, you have been mentioned. How does it look from facebook . Nature of how people consume information is continuing to change. Specifically, you are seeing more and more publishers. The cost of distribution is going closer and closer to zero. You can do that in a way that was harder 12 years ago and much harder 12 years before that. General, itnk, in is important to separate issues. Fake news is an issue. I think what we really talking about here is confirmation bias, another issue. I think you have sort of, how we think about things. At a high level, we are trying to nurture and ecosystem, that means to create value for people , but also publishers. That can be symbiotic in some way. Things that people find interesting. On the publishing side, we try to create tools, create value. Here are really two sides air is trying to nurture the good, there is trying to nurture the good, finding better connected sources. Also, to reduce the negative. Face fake news is one type of negative content. Click bates, nudity, hate speech, bullying. In those divide things two different ways and we pursue those problemse differently. Ed let me ask a crude question. Does facebook make money off what we would consider fake news . Tom there are three things be concerned about. One, from what we can tell, our Research Shows that a lot of fake news publishers are financially motivated. One thing that we worry about that doesnt seem to be a real doesnt that facebook advertise fake news very much. It is not an effective advertising platform. We can manually approve advertisers. Thing where the financial value gets shifted to the publishers using facebook and this is something we need to further reduce is getting free distribution. Getting a bunch of clicks on something takes a lot of people to a website. Maybe it is a paragraph and 80 or 90 at. 90 ads. That is not financially benefiting facebook but it is shifting money to Fake News Networks. The fundingeduce Fake News Networks get. We have more work to do. On the financial front, this is an interesting thing that justin told the, with that one of his sites was caught by google, but the minute that happened, his inbox was filled with hundreds of offers for other places that will run ads on his site. Unfortunately, the opportunity to run ads is profitable. There is a group, i think it is sleeping giants, and 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 and say they should stop advertising there. That is how you define what a think new site is. Ut 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 that is an aggregator that is focused on avoiding this thing. I forget the name of the network. Happening. I hate to be so critical as to name, but iorks by am sick of seeing ads from these networks. If that stopped appearing in my reading on my phone, i would be pretty happy. Understand, if i am an energizing and enterprising young person, i come up with, i find some trendy terms from google, things that are clearly of interest for vast numbers of people, i run a few stories of kanye west and Hillary Clinton, possibly a love triangle with somebody else, and i go and i post this story, a complete fabrication, nicely done though, i have pictures. The next thing you know, i have 500,000 people streaming to there. Have a seriousi footprint. Who is making money from that is Google Adsense sending this . I think it will be helpful if we all got to the same point with the mechanics of how it was and gains are made on the internet with fake news. If you are trying to make fun make money off fake news, you will start many websites. You do this to diversify your risk. If you get shut down in one place, you dont get shut down everywhere else. You then try and create essentially an engine that turns out a lot of content. It is usually very short, sensational, usually deliberately vague and false. You can sometimes go and pay 20 for a paragraph. Network,use an ad which is basically a middleman between you and the advertisers. You basically use that as you get ads on your webpage, usually very low cost ads. If you going into a page and the ads are like for special face cream that alan is using or just weird that ellen is using or weird stuff it is lowquality advertising. You keep creating content and get clicks anyway you can on any social media platform or even of chains. What you need to do is, on average, make more money per visit than the cost to create content for all visits. If i pay you 20 to write something crazy about kanye and or whatever it, was, i need to make more than 20 for all people that visited that content. It is just a machine. What you are always looking for, oncraig said, is how to game the platforms you can. It is somewhat of an adversarial relationship. You preventer spam, one type of behavior, they usually come up with another type of behavior. To completely reduce fake news they would find new ways of making money that might not be fake news. It is an ongoing, neverending relationship. It sounds as if what you are describing are elements that are fundamental to the way the internet pays its way. Purveyors the way the internet is monetized. If i could just read you this quote from the guardian. Fake news but not the speed and ease of its dissemination. It exists because todays capitalism makes it extremely profitable, see google and facebook, to disseminate false and click worthy narratives. Adam the cost of distributing information has gone almost to zero. I had a kid, he is about to turn one. There is also arts of goods ed how bad was the advice . You just have to deal with this, it gets better at three months. Generally, i think it is good that information is easy to access. But there also negative repercussions. The question is, how do we address the negative without reducing the positive effects, which are also very real. Fake news, misinformation, disinformation, that has been around forever and always will be. Think, ishanged, i precisely that the cost of distribution has gone to zero. Information,bute and what that enables is that anyone can be a publisher. Anyone can have a platform and be a publisher and distributor information to anyone in the world at very low cost. That has created a number of things. Lets think about the big platforms. I dont actually think the small fake news it is when they get distributed through Bigger Networks that take advantage of facebook and twitter, that is when we start to be concerned much more. User contributed content, those platforms depend on users bringing the content to it. That is different than the way publishing is to be done. It is different and an important way. The contents Platform Providers want to lower the barriers for people to bring content of them. They want to make it as easy as possible for people to publish, getting open publishing platforms for free. You want to attract of that content. If you did not have that, you would not have anything. At the same time, you want to keep out the manipulations, the spam, the misinformation. But telling the difference is very hard. Quality is so important. Peopleu have 1. 8 billion putting content on the platform, you have to screen out the bad content. That is what changed. I am seems to me, what trying to say about facebook, it has its bond and environment that is squishy and nice, you have baby and dog pictures, then someone posts a fake news story in this friendly, warm environment. It feels friendly, right . You have your friends and family there. Was not know what to do, facebook can possibly do, when it is meant to be a platform to share things with your friends. If you are somebody with bad information, it can easily spread like wildfire. Now on focusing right less fighting fake news, more on supporting trustworthy journalism. There are trustworthy news sites they do a good job, like , it isc, mother jones better and more centrist than people know. Consumer reports is really good. The one hand, you do it you can to support trustworthy journalism. On the other, there are pragmatic things you can do to strike out fake news. The sleeping giants approach is one approach to fighting fake news, depriving fake news operators of advertising dollars. Another thing you can do is cutting the cord with respect to cable tv. There are Fake News Networks that rely not only on advertising, but on cable Franchise Fees. Cable Franchise Fees sometimes run into the billions of dollars. If they do not have access to them anymore, that deprives them of a big source of revenue. So that fake news is no longer as profitable as it used to be. Need to helps we reporters and news organizations provide trustworthy news that is part of my relatively new obsession with helping protect reporters from harassment and cyber bullying, we also need to have trustworthy news organizations, help them come in the case of media lawsuits. People are beginning to float the ideas. It is not a very exciting topic, intellectually. But if you are a reporter who is sued or potentially sued by bad actors, you want Affordable Media insurance. I will stop there, even though i can go on and on. I want to speak directly to you. One thing you can do, i have a use on facebook verys a lot from market to market and community to community. Either way, one thing platforms can do is provide more context about what people are reading. There is more choice of context to help people make important decisions about what to trust and share in the first place. That is an area we will continue to work on. We will also try to prevent having fake news enter the system in the first place. Disruptingre economic models are important. These guys will go away and do something else. There are a bunch of ways i think we can make it uneconomical for publishers. Spoofing, abc. Co, or redirect cloaking. Those of the tactics that can be automated. The other thing we have not done a lot of is take a look at the landing pages. If the pages 90 at, it is probably not a real publication. We have a lot more work to do. Consumers are looking at it and a similar way. A once a pivot off some of the things you have been saying. Let me suggest this, that site theyand these can post storiess and draw readers, but they cannot set agendas. They have been dependent on mainstream news media to weaponize news and give it public importance. I wondered if we could talk a media how we train our students to take part in, what is the news media doing wrong with respect to fake news . How should they be handling it differently . And how can they avoid being unwitting accomplices, for contamination of Public Discourse . One problem i see in the media is, sometimes when something is exploding around, they report on it or give it attention. That does not help. This is my opinion. Actually start to give it credence when you report on it. That would be one place. Part of the problem is you have part of the public once do believe certain things. Did fake news sway the election . It depends what you mean by fake news. Stories like the one i tracked down, that the clintons were responsible for the deaths of all these people, which is in fact a narrative that is floating around. If you are inclined to believe that and you see the story it reaffirms what you believe. Or if these were not out there, would you no longer believe it . Where you going to vote for trump no matter what . That is the question i still have. What impact is this phenomenon having . Deirdre i tend to think that our observance is overblown. It is so shocking, someone could be so morally bankrupt and influence of the media so much. Wehave to think about what Want Companies like facebook to be doing. I have been to like facebooks relatively gentle approach to this, labeling potential stories as fake without taking them down. Been having a conversation about facebook and fake news a year ago, the conversation would be different. How much power would we want a company, a corporation, with an algorithm that is not public, to manipulate what the country can see . And we are sitting here in berkeley, the concern over conservative news stories influencing the media. We want corporations to use the tremendous power they do have over what people read, to manipulate the content because of what it says . Laura but havent they been doing that for ever . Gatekeepers, and now there are no gatekeepers. I am not really sure that what is new is that we do not have gatekeepers. We are trying to look at what is the impact of that . Time, went so much look to the gatekeepers for solutions. What can the Mainstream Media do . A responsible organization like npr. Graduate school of journalism at berkeley do . We have been talking about news providers and the flow of information. We need to address the consumers, the readers of information. We will have a fake news, always. Because of the zero cost of distribution it will not go away. We can lower the benefits and moderate it, but there will always be misinformation and manipulation and infomercials. What we need to do is educate folks to be better consumers of information. This country been addressing Information Literacy nearly as much as we need to come up given the flow of information. We went from scarce information to relatively responsible gatekeepers, with abundant information where everyone has to be their own filter and editor. We have been teaching students at any level, our population, to be good self editors. There is a piece the came out a few weeks ago that looked at High School Students and found going into college, 85 of them cannot tell the difference between a genuine new story and the paid promotion. There are always going to be paid promotions. We have to make sure citizens consisting was between them and know what is paid content and what is journalistic reporting. That is a good example. There is a whole industry devoted to obfuscating that distinction. That ignorance on the part of the reader has an outcome. I want to be up to pay for news that i can trust. What i would like to see is a checkbox that says, only show me news from news organizations that are publicly committed to trustworthy behavior. That would be like an ethics code, diversity policy. Committed to good accountability and corrections policy. Because people make mistakes, no matter what happens. And an organization of fact checkers, like the one run by the Poynter Institute. I want to be able to say, only show me stuff from organizations that promise to do trustworthy news and have a good record. , as aat is enough for me news consumer. That is what i want to pay for. I already do pay for that, i want to pay more for that and a number of different ways. I do not want to prematurely announce it. Drives ifonsor pledge they would use my favorite theme. The idea is, i am putting my money where my mouth is. A lot of other Media Outlets are looking to do this, in conjunction with the api code, where they are looking into the ethics of funding nonprofit journalism. It is a very recent thing, weeks ago. The idea, i think people are willing to pay for trustworthy news. And frankly, there are a lot of people willing to put their money where their mouth is in a big way. That supported groups like republica. Of npr ande think pete others are trustworthy. And there are sleeping giants telling advertisers, do you want to be associated with an trustworthy news . Untrustworthy news . Especially if they allow me to use my favorite theme. The idea is to threaten advertisers. [laughter] what i proposed with a pledge drive, my theme would be, please dear god, make it stop. [laughter] no one will go for it. Sleeping giant, is to deprive great reputational harm. We are just saying to new sites, do you really want to be associated with this . And that is constructive and positive. It does open the door for criticism and action taken against sites because you do not like their messages, not necessarily because they are corrupt or flawed or deserving of a lack of trust. A good deal of what is on breitbart looks like journalism, taste like journalism, comes from a different ideological perspective. It does not mean it should be destroyed. It is part of the landscape of Public Discourse. Yet, i can imagine a good deal of people who disagree with that and would think shutting down a site like breitbart is a good idea. I worry about using ethics as an instrument of political reprisal. And you have this up session with breitbart, may i say, boycotts of any sort, it is a two way sword. People do have to make ethical decisions about that. After doing Customer Service on the net for over 20 years, i can assure folks there are a lot of more people with goodwill then bad will out there. But i haveis naive, been observing human be a long behavior on the net for a long time. People need what they need to act out of goodwill. Before we go to questions from the audience, let me ask about the dangers of overreaction. I think you brought up the possibility this is overblown. I am not sure i entirely agree. Google says it will take steps to keep its ads off pages that misrepresent, mistake, or conceal information about the publisher, the publishers content, where the primary purpose of the site. Sentence, thatat toa fairly broad mandate basically perform Capital Punishment on sites that might expose google to criticism or embarrass them in a corporate way. That thereittle bit might be such a broad brush and public unhappiness with what it mightseeing, motivate and propel a reaction that goes considerably farther than i am comfortable with. You are good at the soundbite, Capital Punishment. You are on the third page of google results, forget about it. If youre talking about the advertising model, there are lots of advertisers, google is not the only one. If they start excluding large parts of advertisement, there will be plenty of people this will been, as long as they want to go to the site. As long as it is private individuals and organizations exercising their right to choose what information they value, that is fine. What worries me is if we say the government should decide what is good for us. We have seen countries that operate that way, i do not want to be living in one of them. I had a chinese general, i was in china, i got an opportunity to have an off the record conversation with this chinese general. Theked her, how much did Peoples Liberation army concern itself with social media . Said, gave me vague answers and then smiled and said, what do you think of twitter revolution now . From the perspective of these other countries, they are terrified of what this unleashes. When i think,nts they kind of know what they are saying. There is a sense of that this andtes instability uncertainty of what is true and it can be used against people. An issue. Hell of a difficult, difficult challenging issue. If you would put up your hands, we have two people with microphones. Questions. Your we could do three at a time. You. Somethingt to share the chinese stated, their Cyber Security stated, it is for bit into use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts. Which is pretty broad. I was hoping you could discuss the fact that the term fake news is already being perverted. President trump accused major Media Outlets of releasing fake news. The term fake news is used for articles that are written that a politician does not like. I think that makes everything because it is a way of eliminating people paying attention to real fake news, and being able to dismiss hard reporting going on. In some ways i think that is more of an issue than fake news on the internet. Face fake news on facebook, sometimes that they are alerted to the fact it is fake news. Are not think consumers 100 stupid, i think they recognize that a lot. Clearly, it is a big issue. But i do think people are aware of it and taking steps to point it out. But with trump saying bad news about me is fake news, that is a huge issue. A constructive approach is to promote the trustworthy stuff. A couple weeks ago i remembered is bettery school, it to light a candle than curse the darkness. The term fake news is abused. It has emotional resonance that we willme from still get the term, fake news. But lets support the trustworthy stuff. This is a tremendous problem. Gamester used to play this where i would Say Something and she would say it at the same time and it would make you shut up. You say fake news, i will say fake news, i know everyone is saying fake news, and it is crazy. I would like to see a different approach to coverage. We tended to move from event to event two event. Recently i was with a group of people talking about this maybe we should stick with stories and cover them as they unfold instead of just jumping from a bad days of thing. If we are going to follow the health and Human Services department, make that an ongoing thing we are covering, rather than just going through the days sound bites. Maybe some of this will involve a different approach to news and rethinking how we cover it, as well. It is being distorted. On facebook, wheeler people to fake news, we have done that for a long time. People have reported things they disagreed with, long before this election. The distortion argues to your point, it is not new, entirely. Important, if you are involved in issue in some way, the platform, the consumer, it is critical youre clear what you mean when you say fake news, and you do not allow the conflation prevent you from making progress in whatever is your responsibility. Each of us in different ways need to pursue it. Another question . I was going to Say Something similar to what the other person just asked. Comment, i have some optimism and faith of the people that innocently passed fake news will get better at not doing it, just emails do not send anymore about nigerians trying to send us fortunes. As we get aware of the issue we get better. My issue is similar to what that trump calledwhen out cnn and called it a fake news site, i thought that was really dangerous. The story he was referring to about the russian report of theps behavior in russia, story was, in a larger sense, true. There was such a report. Report wereof the as cnn stated it. The general nature of the stated, thewere idea that it was unverified and possibly largely untrue was clearly stated. There was not anything untrue about the story. Focusingaracterizing, on the fact that the report itself might have been untrue and to say therefore it is fake news, sets up a situation where now, you are muddying the idea of the fake news, but castrating so trumpte like cnn, can get cnn to be culpable of fake news. It makes the entire network on trustworthy. Untrustworthy it becomes difficult to decide who you can believe. My question is, what can you do about that . Especially when it is the president involved . I degree that this is really awful. We are going to have misinformation and manipulated information, always. We will have more of it because it is cheaper and easier to distribute it. What we need our discerning, Critical Thinking citizens. People who Pay Attention to where the news and information is coming from and make judgments about that. Something like what trump did is antiliteracy. It is telling people, you believe what you want to believe. Representing an institution that is very highly trusted, the u. S. Government, he says, do not worry about it, if you do not like it, it is not true. , andis a serious problem antiscience is a problem to read people say we should be antiscience because we do not like what science tells us, this is false. Our institutions are telling us to be antiliterate, antiscience, antiknowledge. That is dangerous. It is not the job of the government or an institution to tell us what information is correct. It is to help people value and celebrate Information Literacy and Critical Thinking so people learn early in school and throughout their lives to make judgments and not accept these statements. Our own institutional leaders to undercut that is horrifying. I would to send a little in the sense that what trump was saying, the underlying veracity of the report the intelligence people were passing along was nonexistent. He cannot welcome the fact they were briefing the president of president elect on a reality that did not, in his view, exist. And the media has responsibility not to just relay what one person says to somebody else, but what they say must be true. He did have a very strong hand in this one. I think americas foremost media provided a solution to this. In the one case, he points out, when you are talking about politics and the press, it is like visiting the monkey cage at the zoo. At each flinging feces other and you think, they should not do that. But what you really think is, the zookeeper should say, that monkey bad monkey. That is the role of the press in this environment. To this, cnnlution leaves it there, he points out a politician just came out and allied to a reporter. Something known to be a black and white lie. The reporter was taken aback, knew that this was a lie. He said, we have to leave it there. So you can look at this segment called cnn leaves it there, daily show, about eight years ago. Most probably the effective media ethics commentator in the country. If people get the joke, it is jon stewart. Catherine brought up the question about facebook, if we had this conversation a year ago, we would he talking about them censoring or curating our news in some way. That argument passed a long time ago because it is been well documented, we only see a very tailored, customized news in our own feeds. What i is a Hillary Clinton supporter was reading on facebook was different than what a donald trump supporter was reading. Wended facebook start seeing the rise of the fake news . How long before the election . And why did it take you so long to address it . Publicly you said you were only addressing it after the election. We have been working on fake news as a broader element for a long time. I did a report on it. So i know it is true. [laughter] i appreciate it. I think a year and a half ago the amount of attention in the wake of the u. S. Election has been enormous. The amount of intensity and work has increased. We have not seen a ton of increase around the election. The amount of fake news on the platform, is relatively small. It should be smaller, we should get it is close to zero as possible. We have to be realistic. As long as it is an issue, we should address it as much as possible. More broadly, the question is, how can we make sure we are crating value for the People Services . Fake news is part of a bigger set of challenges we have. Though i appreciate the amount of attention fake news is getting, because i like the fact that there is scrutiny and that motivates us to go to work. About two months, we could really get something out there. I also want to make sure we do not miss the important things. It was actually before the election, we wanted to be really careful. Pointers,to work making sure the system would do the right thing. All that was stuff we wanted to be really careful about. Speede trying to balance and responsibility. That is always our job. The last thing i will add it, there are two sides to these things. If we have more stringent policies around what content is shared, we are dangerously close to impinging on speech and other issues. We received a lot of criticism a few months ago about mistaking a taking down a photo from a norwegian publisher. Which photo . There is a historical photo about the war in vietnam. There are children and it. Won a pulitzer prize, but they took it down because there was a naked girl. Underage. That was criticism, recently. On letting people express themselves. But we will try to be as responsible as we can. Was that taken down by a person or an automated response . The way it works is very different. If you were the New York Times, the decision about posting the at the pagebe made one meeting in the morning. 10 people would argue about it. But things could be posted tens of thousands of times. Then it gets reported and we have people were reviewing the reporting. That can happen relatively quickly. It was reported and taken down. Policy, weange our are always learning. We want to learn more and try to get better at these things. Can i ask a quick follow up . Of the take people out equation after there was criticism from conservative groups that there is a bias in facebook on taking down conservative news . People out of the equation and brought it back to just algorithms . Or reports. Ewsfeed trending, we used to have people write summaries for each report. We tried to find a way to do that. What we do now, we source from an actual publisher. Questions . 1, 2, 3. My question is like he said. It is an incredibly brilliant strategy. This is fakeaying news, it is like a playground strategy. Someone is doing something and you call them that and they call it that you back, and if you react it is a cycle. It seems like the only way it is being responded to, the people on most of our sides of the aisle, were appalled. They are saying what i am saying. On the other side they completely believe it. I suppose media literacy, is that the way to do it . Cannot happen quickly, fast enough . Everyone is talking to their own side. And theyre are playing on that, bigtime. That was my question. I do not know if there are further comments on. I see a tremendous hunger in the news industry to do this. The Thing Holding us back is a bit of fear of harassment and bullying. You could call it harassment and bullying in the legal system, litigation stuff. I see people beginning to move on it. I think it is happening faster than i thought. The silver cloud in the electoral lining. The news industry has an idea something needs to be done. Said if wey involved do not hang together, we will hang separately. [laughter] i do see hope with this. Things can happen. One of the efforts is the trust project. If anyone here wants to talk to wely from the trust project, can get you an interview with her fairly quickly. Happening, and that is why i am beginning to obsess about the issue of harassment and cyber bullying. Not just in the news media, but in general, and news media in particular. A tiny boneto pick with you, ed. I think what happened at the trump presser was something qualitatively new on this front. That at thise 2017, we january 19, are dealing with a lot of things we dealt with in the past, but also new problems. Covered theer jones story well before the election. They reported on the existence of memos from professionals. They said they had talked to the fbi. Both feeds publish the memos. ,hat trump did at the presser he said not you, not you, you are fake news. Your organization is terrible, quiet. All these things deserve unpacking. What i am curious about from each of you is, what you identify as a qualitatively new thing that is going on, and whether you see a qualitatively new, doable remedy . His, has already laid out so he has a pass. I want to hear what the rest of you have to say. The fact that he called the cnn out in a press conference is new. However, the Obama Administration initially did not want to give interviews to fox news because they did not like fox news and people were all over the Obama Administration for this. In that sense, it is a degree of difference. I dont think we have ever seen not where president called somebody out like that. Hearing, cnn at one point come to fox news defense with regard to trump, and i think there is an effort for journalistic organizations to stick together to defend each others right to report the news. That seems to me a very important thing going on at this moment. Theesist that singling out donald trump did. I agree. It is true the administrations play favorites forever. Wasid feel as though trump criminalizing editorial judgment in a way to banish, you are off the table, i am not considering you a journalist anymore, youre proffering something else. That seemed to ratchet up the combat, if you like. You just mentioned china a bit ago. On an exchange with other journalists and entrepreneurs. One of the things they talked firewall,the great where google and facebook are blocked from that entire country. You cannot even access the type of information. We spoke about groups and organizations that would help filter or create filters for the consumers on what media they may or may not be able to consume. On getting the right media and traveling on her right to maket sure we are blocking the right people . Suggested thatas a governmentimposed solution is a good idea. We have robust, First Amendment protection. Although there are narrow categories of speech unprotected, recently on a case won an honorhave there has to be something in addition to that. Anyone who doubts the government should not be involved, to police go through the exercise of what it is they want the government to do. Do you Want Congress to pass a law in certain areas . Do you want them to say false speech is inadmissible . It is clear government solution does not make a lot of sense. We are left with intermediaries trying to run with this. I like the approach of labeling because we do have a different First Amendment tradition here. Website is starved of traffic and forced to shut down because of something google does, how much comfort do i have that it was not the government that didnt . I am saying that is a concern. Concerned about how much we rely on intermediaries and how much we want them to suppress speech because there are chokepoints for speech. The internet intermediaries are the payment companies, we use them to cut off payments. Does it matter to you as a website owner whether it is the government or somebody else . Three more questions. Back, withnd in the the glasses. Thank you. Like a precision machine. If you have a microphone, go ahead. 2015 book, the devils chessboard, he uses declassified public records to trace a long history, allowing the cia to plant stories. For example, they handpicked a journalist for the times to send it to the congo to cover someone who invented stories about torture chambers and political assassinations. You can job pretty Straight Line wmds inr coverage of iraq. On what grounds can we draw a distinction between those falsified and planted stories and what we are discussing here today as fake news . And secondly, what can we do to combat or push back against false stories coming from mainstream or trustworthy organizations . That is a good question. [laughter] who wants to have at it . [laughter] organization finds a project, follows through with corrections and accountability, you tell them, this was not factual, here is the evidence. Then you see the results. Give them a chance, then publish it. Be publishing something that says how wonderful they were about fixing the argument. I am mr. Positive. You identify an area of real frailty and vulnerability in the press. If you have been lied to by the source you pledged to, blowing the whistle on that source is problematic. Government lies delivered under those terms become extremely difficult to expose. It is still worth distinguishing between what youre talking about on the fake news and what were discussing. This falls within the bailiwick of reporters negotiating and trying to confirm the veracity of information they are getting from sources. Deliberateing about byrication of information the equivalent of reporters acting for personal benefit. That fabrication is extremely profitable and useful. It comes with a civic consequence that a great many people go around believing things that are not true. The result of what you are describing and we have been discussing is the same. People believe things are not the case. They have a common dysfunction, and i agree with that. Reporters are at a far better are misled and deceived, but that is your job to determine the veracity of information youre given area i see where youre going with it, but it is a different and continuing problem the journalism faces. I think it is fundamentally a more challenging issue. The question is, how do you address it . Saying the New York Times is trustworthy, point to the fact we need multiple approaches. Is an important one, a skeptical reader can ask questions, look at what the sources are. I think skeptical journalists, as well. That is also important. And dialogue. You can talk with different , on a platform like facebook, or in person. I think the debate is healthy. Tose are parallel tracks trustworthy labels or reputations on a publication level. You just need a multipronged approach. Can have a microphone . Know if it is true that right wing fake news generates more revenue than the left wing fake news . [laughter] justin kohlerthat said it did. He tried to come up with fake, leftwing new stories and they did not do as well. So he stopped doing it. How do you prove that . I do not know. That is just what he told me. Beyond the financial motivations, there can be broad, intellectual impacts about fake news. They can expand by really be far anyar beyond retraction of retraction. Some want to curtail fake news, i wondered if you had plans to help this issue . I think there are two coup ways to approach that. Let people know retroactively. Maybe if they read it or shared it. To try and move further upstream. To stop it from entering the system in the first place. You want to make sure as little comes in as possible. And when it happens you need to react as quickly as you can. Lettingneed to consider people know the questions who and how. I lead of the trust project, thank you for the shout out, c raig. We are trying to work on the positive in the sense of helping people identify quality news. Feed reported on a survey they had done of over 1000 people asking where they got the news on whether they trusted it. , whopeople in the survey get their news from facebook, most people also said they do not trust the news they get on facebook. [laughter] my question is, is this a good or a bad thing . Could this be part of what is undermining trust in the news . And if it is, what can we do about it . I can tell you. [laughter] i think you have an opinion. And no, i am not sure. It is an interesting phenomenon. I do not know what to make of survey results like that. News, butere i get my i do not believe it. What kind of full do you take me for . I wonder if that is become a cultural trope. Of course i consume a lot of things, i do not believe what it says, but it shapes my actions, worldview, it has all the effects. Anybody would say of course i believe what i read in the New York Times, people would let you and walk away. They would move down a couple stools because they would think you are a fool. Largerr if there is a mistrust in major institutions that you are seeing a portion of. It does not have to do with the fact that what they read on facebook they fundamentally disbelieved. I should clarify, the percentages of people that from theirs newspaper and from their Television News was much higher. Think the survey has a some faults. But there is something there that seems noteworthy. There are two sides. A lot of people are considering news on facebook. We do not write the news, were a platform and we connect with sources. By and large, it is a good thing. We have helped a lot of people discover a lot of content that they might not have discovered otherwise. It is good. The publications i read are not from san francisco. In the middle of the 20th century you could only read one to three papers. I think it is a good thing. And i think skepticism is a good thing. I do not think trust is binary. You should have a certain amount of skepticism. That means we have work to do, but we have a skeptical set of people using arm platform, that is good. That is terrific news to the extent it was a good survey and measured what it said it was measuring. A large fraction of our population here is more news stories from facebook is hardly surprising because that is where they spend their time reading. Theyd see their news more there than elsewhere. They actually recognize it is an a platform that is editorial platform, they are not selecting or verifying the reliability, that is also great news. It is great news that people recognize that are different qualities of information and they should Pay Attention to the recognize if you read it in wikipedia it may be right, but do not assume it is. Check further if you are going to rely on it to make a decision or judgment. This is for adam. Since so many people get so much of their news through facebook, for some people, that is all they receive. Might visithere news websites are get a package in a nice, diverse nest of stories oppositional to what they feel, summer feel good, some are upsetting. Facebook seems designed for pleasurable experiences. Youre saying things that reaffirm your beliefs. Atomized based on sharing stories. If i only see things i agree with, it in center by his fake news. Facebook,omebody like presentou prove information that is oppositional to someones beliefs . I would not want to see things i disagree with on facebook, but there could be value to that. Findr mission is to stories that are meaningful, not pleasurable. We cannot know for every individual what that is. Some things we look at are going to correlate with whether you agree with that. More and more toward, did you spend a lot of time reading it . Having a conversation about it . People on the internet have long discussions about what they disagree about all the time. [laughter] how much of the video did you watch . That said, there are multiple forces at play. People have publishers they follow and they will fall into somewhat likeminded friends and publishers. That is a force towards less diversity. There is also a force in the other direction. Some tend to follow lots of publications. In europe, the average person has over 50 questions from outside their country. It is hard to find forgery friends that live in Different Countries that are likeminded. To that pushes diverse city. Best weakens all tell, we continue to look into this. Exposed to as much content they disagree with on facebook as off facebook. We have about five minutes left, lets try to get a couple more. Yes. I think fake news is a really important topic and im glad we are talking about it. But it seems premature to talk about fake news when millions of people in america do not have any trust in the Media Establishment at all. Is, is our concentration on this misguided . She would be focusing on fake news . Or should we be focusing on building up trust in america in the media in general . Do you think fake news is another way of describing this larger sense of mistrust in the media . Is that the reason it is taking adoptedbeen so widely and applied to wrongdoing that has nothing to do with fabrication . Thatthink the issue is some people might not trust any media, mainstream establishment. They do not care if facebook thinks it is fake. Coming from an establishment news source i will not trusted because i do not trust the establishment. I am wondering why we are focusing on this small subset and not looking at the Bigger Picture . I think it is a really important question. Unfortunately, we have not talked about the problem of financing media right now. There used to be armies of local News Reporters who were within their communities out there representing their local community. You could have a relationship with them. We are also at a moment when local newspapers are going under. I feel like to address this question we have to come up with to have more local news that is interactive with its reportingnews i was wasnt local community meetings, looking at issues like double parking. That kind of being there in the community is really important because then people feel like it is their media. In sanin the mission francisco and all local has become a Community Source and it has flaws but i trust them because they are right there and i think that that problem right there is huge and we need to do something to address it and it is probably bigger and beyond this panel. One more question. I wanted to ask about public data and accountability. My analysis showed an increase in fake news sharing every day. That is using the data i was able to find. Trust meknow if people or facebook. Facebook and google can instantly restructure the entire incentive around the media ecosystem. Getscan decide what news attention. To they have a responsibility to provide transparency about how their code impacts that . They can provide aggregate data about how much attention is being directed to what content. That would be one example of this accountability. I think we have a lot of responsibility to be as transparent as we can. Most importantly, to communicate our values and standards. Hat is important publishers and for our users, so they can understand how it works. When it comes to issues like fake news, it is challenging. It becomes challenging because of the adversarial relationship. The more specific we are about what we are doing, the less effective it becomes. I think we are getting better. Over the last three years, we have announced every major change for actively which was not the case when i started. But when welot out have the most room to improve is how to scale that average because i meet people who [indiscernible] we have to figure out how to scale taking seriously. I am talking to people who are doing similar work analyzing networks, fake news, that actress. Bad actors. Technology platform can say is sometimes it is constrained by law regulations particularly in europe. This is based on talking to people who are doing this. Be careful because if you are doing analytical work which can expose bad actors, they fight dirty. Be careful. That, we are out of time. [laughter] i want to thank our panel. [applause] from National Public radio, ucbook, craigslist. Erkeley thank you very much. [applause] [captions Copyright National 7]ble satellite corp. 2016] cspans washington journal, live every day. News and policy issues that impact you. Aaron, president of the alliance of justice, discuss her groups nomination of the appointing of judge gorseish to such to theuch gor supreme court. Farzad, host of npr one podcast full disclosure, will discuss how u. S. And Financial Markets are reacting to president trumps first weeks in office. Join the