Transcripts For CSPAN Swedish 20240705

Sweden and the Digital Forensics research lab. Good morning everyone. My name is karin olofsdotter. I have the great honor of serving as the ambassador for sweden for the u. S. You may wonder why youre in a black room. I thought the architect had run out of ideas and money but it is to show you how dark it is scandinavia in the wintertime. Dont let that put you off. Do come and visit our wonderful country. Its great for your you americans, drop travel it is wonderful to see so many of you today. Joining us online from. I want to thank the Council Digital Research Forensic lab for cohosting the event and to the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of sciences, their partners and supporting organizations. Todays event is part of the nobel prize summit. Its a testament to the enduring legacy of one of the most famous swedes of all time. What we do is celebrate his vision for world shaped by knowledge, peace and progress. The theme of this years nobel prize summit is truth, trust and hope. How can we build trust in troop, fact that scientific evidence, to create hope for the future for all of us. That is an important question on days like this. Todays discussion on fighting disinformation cannot be more relevant. In our digitalized and connected world, with access to an abundance of information, in forensic activities are a persistent threat. We, no, unfortunately now, unfortunately are experiencing increased tensions and conflict around the world. We see influence complains campaigns exploiting our vulnerabilities. They are gaining traction, and are spread throughout our society. This development is challenging the values that are fundamental to our way of life, such as democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Nobel was convinced that ideas and scientific discovery are at the heart of human progress, towards a better world. We are hosting this event in sweden, freedom ofs breach freedom of speech and expression are two core values for the swedish government. More often, disinformation is threatening these ideals. The issue is not only a matter of truth but a matter of trust. In the open dialogue which our democracies rely on. The threat is global and requires global response. We need widespread corporation, understanding and determination to effectively counteract development and uphold democratic values. And the Scientific Solutions that really work, we must listen to the experts. Were super excited to have with us a nobel laureate, martin chancey, who will share his insight into the scientific aspect of this issue. Were joined by magness, the director general of the sweetest agency for psychological defense, whose understanding of operational aspects of this issue is key in finding solutions. We are happy to welcome rebecca trumbull, who is director of the institute of data and policy at georgetown university. George washington university. He is in this town too. I mix them up. Excuse me. Dr. Trumbull has deep knowledge on these issues based on her own research on political communication, digital research, mythology and research ethics. With this excellent panel, i am certain that this seminar will provide important insights and knowledge. We all need to learn, to identify, understand, and counteract information in our daily lives. Its really our shared responsibility. Directly after this panel, we will get some of the necessary tools to tackle disinformation, as our colleagues from the Swedish Agency for psychological defense will lead us in an educational workshop. These are the tools we need to foster resilience, defined counter strategies, and strength and trust. Only together can we face the challenge, safeguard our democratic values, and ensure freedom of speech and democratic discourse are upheld. I really look forward to todays thoughtprovoking and insightful discussion. With this, i would like to welcome and handed this over to the atlanta councils lab. Thank you so much for being with us today. [applause] thank you so much, not a member asked her. Its madame ambassador. Its wonderful experience the amount of either darkness or sunlight depending on what season youre in, in this building. If you want it to feel like winter, come down here. If want it to feel like prolonged summer in alltime daylight, you go upstairs. Depending on what your mood is, i want to do housekeeping on that front. In the spirit of building true trust, there is one slight inundation to our agenda for this morning. Dr. Trumbull had a family emergency and is not able to join us. So, were really excited to be joined by katrina, who runs the Capacity Building programs Educational Programs within the Swedish Agency we work with. Really looking forward to the conversation. I think, madame ambassador, opened it up very well. I do not have my phd. Ill be using a number of notes, as opposed to my astute colleagues appear. Up here. What we will be talking about today is not only miss and disinformation, but what we do about it. My hope for this conversation is not just to navel gaze on a big problem we know as a societal challenge, but to get in the weeds about our understanding and what we go do about it. Which, i think this group is going to be particularly well placed to do. The first question last bit of housekeeping, well talk for 30 minutes, then we will turn over to audience q a for about 15 minutes before going to the workshop. If you have burning questions for any of us, be thinking about those. The first question we had a chance to connect before this conversation. And one of the things that came up in terms of how we look at this field, as a scientific field, was this concept that was popularized at the onset of the pandemic in which we face the moment where it was pronounced, in which people all over the world were inundated with information. The term that became more popularized for that phenomenon that was happening in parallel to the pandemic was infodemic. I will turn to martin. How do you feel about infodemic and is it something that grows rapidly or is it a drip, drip, drip . Does it have a Snowball Effect . What does it do in terms of diminishing trust . Is it immediate, revolutionary, or somewhat revolutionary over time . It can work in many ways. The basic idea, as he pointed out, is to have a lot of noise. If you have a lot of noise, you cant tell what is the truth, whats made up, its just youre overwhelmed with information. Youre overwhelmed with statements that muddy your understanding. And w having to and having to wade through that is the difficult part. Its this idea that the infodem ic, not only is there misinformation or disinformation, purposeful falsehoods, but rather that theres so much of it around, that it obscures what is happening. I would say there is another aspect to this. I would call false equivalence. That there are two points of view. They are both equal. When in fact, 97 of People Climate change, it is talked about a lot, 97 of all scientists had opinions, 3 were another. You never saw television percent where there were 97 people on one side, you saw one in one it made a false equivalence. That is another way of flooding and that is another way of letting the airwaves with information that just blocks out what has already been a consensus. The way that we think about this moment in our daytoday work is two coinciding factors that are global. One is we as a human to raise have more access to information, whether it is true or false or whether it is debated or whatever in this moment in history. There has never been a moment where you can pull out any number of the devices that we have on our person regularly and google it or search for the answer to the question. And then, number two, there has never been a moment and she would history it where we are is connected or have the opportunity to be as connected as we are right now, so that is an accelerant for sure. I guess my followup question on infodemic, do you think the inundation of information somewhat illogically leads to less space for debate or discovery of a shared set of facts among the population . I think it can. I am not entirely sure. I am sure we will come up with other people here, which is how does one develop Critical Thinking and where most important of these three words for this summit i think is trust. How do you learn what to trust, who to trust . And that cuts down on the other problems. I think that it is the building of trust in glorified science that is a critical thing we need to do in the future. So we will go back to Critical Thinking in just a moment, but in the meantime, we have the pleasure and responsibility of sitting in a democracy at this point. All of us that are on the stage, and a big part of building that trust is the role of government into democracy, a government that is for people and by people. And, magnus, you are in government right now with a storied career in academia as well as public service. So i guessed my basic question with a long followup is what is the role and responsibility of government in this space of building that trust and engaging with populations on this issue in particular . And i guess the point of context for this group is that we are sitting in washington, d. C. , and in the swedish system it makes sense that the agency you run is the Psychological Defense Agency, and there is a long story history and culture of that in sweden, so what does that look like and how do you think about the role of government given your spacing government and how you engage with populations and do your work . Thank you. [laughter] yes, a real government agency, psychological defense could sound a bit scary to for eight years that are not used to this kind of swedish concept that is also spread to other countries. I think estonia also use the term psychological defense. It was established in sweden in the early 1940s as a term of establishing a counter work again psychological warfare, and it only makes sense. If you must have psychological warfare, must have psychological defense. What we said back then is psychological defense is just as important as airplanes. We stood in front of enemies like nazi germany a declared war on the rest of the world more or less and we tried to develop a total defense to combat our task is to safeguard democracy, safeguard free speech, freedom of opinion. Swedens freedom and independence, so that is the basis for what we try to do. And i like to say that psychological defense in sweden rests on three pillars. The first is free, independent media. That is totally vital. Independent journalism is extremely important for what we call psychological defense. The other is a informed and well educated population, which is something that we are trying to build within our education system, of course, but also through our free media. And the third pillar is trust, trust between people, trust in institutions, trust in the media. Without those three, you will have a lapse of psychological defense. We do operations, we monitor for an information influences. We do not monitor domestic misinformation or disinformation. Only foreign. Should we go in the domestic scene that would infringe on free speech in sweden. We only look abroad. That is very important. And that we do capability or Capacity Building, which cuts in and we can tell you more about, and we also tried to prepare for a possible wartime situation in the future. There is a major war going on in europe, as you all know, and this has completely changed the situation for many countries in europe, for ukraine of course, but also for sweden. We have made an application for membership in nato. The situation as deteriorated, and also democracy it has declined. There are quite a few organizations trying to measure democracy in the world globally, and they are all unanimous in saying democracy has pushed back. You could almost say that democracy is under siege, and this is something that we need to change really, because democracy is vital for us all, for the security of everybody, so i think there is a great deal to do, and we need all to engage in that i think to safeguard democracy. It seems like the conceptual way to put that is protecting the parameters of debate within swedish democracy, from things like foreign manipulation, but also protecting speech, number one, and the ability to keep it is like putting not necessarily a border but protecting the parameters of an open information environment, which in many ways is the greatest strength of free and open systems or democracies. And in addition to that is sometimes a major vulnerability landscape that we have to look at and say how do we make this more resilient . Which is a good segue to something martin mentioned in the very first question on how do we build more Critical Thinking in the space or how do we engage with public and it build up that trust over time . Because it is not something that happens overnight. It is not like a flip of the switch where they are trustworthy on monday and not choice within the next day. So within the role of government , how do you think about the Capacity Building and the training or the educational aspect of engaging with the publics on this issue . What does the program look like, but more importantly, what is the first step . Thank you for that. We are trying to raise all of society, and we are doing this by, for example, building on capacity, contributing on the strength of the populations resilience by its rating knowledge and contributing to the population and relevant actors from all levels, so they are prepared in terms of psychological defense. And it starts early. It starts by learning kids and youth in school about fact checking, as we said, and also by Building Trust in institutions, but we also support government of support on all governmental levels Front National to regional to local levels, and that is how to identify disinformation that is directed at sweden and how it approaches at Different Levels. There is a big interest from the schools, but it is also from a municipality level. For example, earlier this year we met with over 100 municipality officials in sweden, and one step that we have learned that is efficient is using red teamblue team workshops. First we start off by being the antagonists aiming on their vulnerabilities. Thank you. The same group is the blue team and trying to counter this disinformation, and this is the work we see also that they can bring for their resilience work on all levels, and also their preparedness planning, so that is one of the first steps that we are using, and it is been very successful. I have one million questions on this, because we engage with Civil Society all the time in training Capacity Building, so how do you look at the online information environment and to in a major way . Whether that is human rights abuses in any place in the world, so security related research or at looking at overarching narratives and how they impact the population. And it is scientific. We are looking at how the nuts and bolts of an information environment were and how humans interact within an information environment, so within our Capacity Building, i really want to talk shop with you. In your experience, do students preferred to be on the red team or the blue team . This is for the government officials. We have not done it in the schools, but i can say that the red team workshop, everyone is really, like, there are so many things coming up, and they have a really fun time doing it, and that is just part of when you are countering it. How do you do that . You do not have the team counter everything. It is a really nice way of listing the problems and also bringing together all of these actors from Different Levels on how they can learn from each other, and also as i said bringing this to misinformation and psychological defense into total defense planning. My hypothesis on this, given we are talking about a scientific field of research is that red team would foster more creativity and a little bit more energy, whereas the blue team would foster more, oh man, what are we going to do about this . It is harder to build resilience more than poke holes in things. Easier to build things as opposed to tearing things down. It is not every day that i share a stage with somebody who won a nobel prize just as a moment of reference, but in terms of the Scientific Method of building knowledge, i guess and this is not a plant question, so bear with to be here. How does a detachment from fact, whether that is the unintentional spreading false information or the intentional spread of false information or just kind of the inundation that we are talking about of so much information that it is hard to ours through parse through, how does that impact the work of the scientific field, which is a deliberate method . The more pointed way to asked that question is how can you prove to me that green fluorescent 13 is a biological marker . If i was at the thanksgiving table, then how does that conversation work into Building Trust on something that is genuinely and by definition breakthrough knowledge or information . So i think there are a lot of elements to this. I think the first part is i do not think there is a Scientific Method. I think we teach a Scientific Method to Elementary School students, but there are many ways of making discoveries. If you look at that nobel prize biographies, you will be astonished to find how many people say i was doing this, and then by mistake this happened. And i notice this and i went on to work on that. We have this idea about a Scientific Method is that we come up with a problem and then we come up with a hypothesis and we test the hypothesis, and then we go to sweden to get our prize. [laughter] this straightforward method that we do that, but i think it is a little bit different. Often we make an observation, and that brings a whole set of new questions that we did not imagine. Green fluorescent protein, there is an actual very good example of this. When someone was trying to understand out jellyfish produce green light, they are one of many organisms that are bioluminescent. They can actually use a Chemical Reaction to generate light, and it turns out all of the different organisms, fireflies, the, bacteria, they will do it differently, and he was trying to figure out how it works. And he was a very good chemist. He worked really hard, and he failed all the time. And then one night after a whole summer of failure, he failed again. He takes his press, he is hungry and wants to go home and have dinner, he throws everything in the sink that has seawater in it, turns out the light. He was about to leave the room when he looks back at the sink and it is glowing. Something he had never seen before. And he wonders about it. Maybe it was something in the seawater. I have never even tested it. He goes back and he tested. Some would say that his fate. He gets the chemical that generates light, but it is the wrong color. Instead of it being green light that is produced, it is blue light that is produced. And that causes him to stretch his head a little bit more and said how could that be . He throws calcium into everything, nothing else happens. He says maybe there is something that actually converts the blue to green, and so he goes and takes a handheld light and looks at all of the samples, and sure enough in a completely different sample there is something that every time he shines blue light on it, it glows green. That is what fluorescence is, in this protein that he discovered as a result of two accidents. One in the sink and having the wrong color, something that no one imagined was there. So i think there are different ways of doing science. I think there are also different ways that even if he had done it and i said, oh, this is what i had. That would not necessarily mean that he believed he would have to do that multiple times. Other people would do it. As other people confirmed it, then there would be no issue. There is this confirmation that has to be done. Sometimes things do not get confirmed, but maybe it is not because they are important enough to confirm, but when it comes an important issue, it is repeating the confirmation of this. My part in this was to say, lets put this into a worm or bacteria that are transparent, and we can actually see genes turn on. It worked, it was wonderful. We could not keep our mouths shut, so we told a lot of people, and they tried it, and they got it to work. So it was not that people disbelieved what i said. It was that they did the experiments themselves and said, yes, this works. Elementary and High School Students do this and have this experiment. So i do not think is this verification that happens for multiple people that i think is very important. Well, it seems like think you very much for that, that is a perfect example of tilting knowledge. And part of the responsibility, part of the challenge here is to protect the process of discovery and verification. So over time in a moment, an era where we are inundated with stuff and debate and contrarian is him contrarianism, how do we reject the ability to discover new things and prove to more and more people that those things are true . For us, it is the premise of our work, right . We have a team of researchers all over the world that are looking at the online information environment. Things like human rights abuses or things that are verifiably false, and the way that we go about that were, whether it is the team that is focused here in d. C. Or the team focused on the war in ukraine right now or the team that is focused on online information environments across asia or belize or whatever, it is open source. The whole premise of it is a transparent methodology that leads to analysis, and a lot of times that analysis we have high confidence income and when we are not very confident in the findings, we will publish it anyways and we will be honest that there are a lot of questions here. But the whole point of that is to say here is how we found this thing, and do not trust us because we are at a fancy organization or an organization that has a name in washington dc. Trust us because these results are replicable and verifiable and accessible to you, and that transparency built the space for accountability, so when we go back to the role of institutions in the space, and how do institutions navigate a moment where that kind of protection of process or of an environment is really difficult . I will turn back to magness on this, because you have a team that does this every day. How do you go about this analysis . And i get more importantly or as importantly the communications of that analysis. Yeah, we analyze what foreign adversaries are projecting toward sweden when it comes to information, of course, but i think you said the word transparency, and that is what it is all about. We need to build trust to build legitimacy. I am a historian. I am fascinated hearing you talk about these proteins and fluorescence or whatever, which i do not get at all. [laughter] but i see where youre going. Disinformation information is also targeting our history, and we can see how certain authoritarian states are trying to rewrite the story leading up to world war ii, for instance. Saying finland was the culprit bringing about the attack on the soviet union. They started world war ii because i did this and that, and we can see that massacre, which was obvious from the start who did it, it was the soviet union killing 20,000 polish officers is not being said, no, it was really the germans. In spite of marcia admitting it in 2008 as well, we did it. So by rewriting history you are somewhat determining how we are seeing the world today. Research is so vital for our open debate. We need to have transparency, we need to have free research, so to safeguard freedom of research is absolutely vital for psychological defense in sweden. It seems like the ability to protect discovery, learning new things as well as the ability to protect the shared set of facts that has happened already is really key to building up the trust. There is a baseline. If you are looking at history and you say anything is possible , then we probably will not be that resilient, if you were looking at New Discovery and say anything is possible, that is a really healthy place for society to be and in terms of innovation and learning new things, and that strikes me as a nice balance for the nobel prize in terms of where we go next. I will ask one question, which was generated by the audience, which is in this moment in which all of the universe of things that we are talking about is occurring within a moment of hyper polarization or increasing polarization and backslide in not only democracy but a basic trust in institutions that we have all worked in and touched and felt no kind of how they work, whether that is academia or Civil Society or even media or government or private industry in some shape or form, what does building resilience look like in a moment of polarization in which it is absolutely necessary to protect the dialogue and the debate, but also to decide on a shared set of facts . And i will start we will start on this end and go all the way down on that question. So one of the things that has come up in the discussions the last couple of days for the summit has been that people want a feeling of belonging, of being part of a group that they trust, and i think in part it is the idea of Building Trust. I do you build trust in people . I think it is not a one time event. I think this is a continuing thing. I have been very impressed with the group in new york city, young journalists that realized there was a major omission in new york. That is there was no one talking to the many immigrant communities that were in new york city, and they decided that is what they were going to cover. It is called documented, it is a very Impressive Group of people, and i was talking to one of the founders, and i asked them how did things work . How did it work with the pandemic to get information about the pandemic to people . And he said to well, what we have done is we have gone and listen to people, learned about their history, what countries they have come from, what their interests are. And we found that many of the people in these communities were essential workers, but they did not have information on how to get the micro grants that were coming up during the pandemic, so they set up list of information. Here is where you can get this information. They provided a service that was reliable and truthful and important for members of that community, and they became involved. So it is one, local, it is involvement. It is continual, and as questions came up about the ben deming, members of that community got back in touch with them and said can you find out about this problem or that problem or how we go about doing this . So they built up the trust first , and it is not pontificating from on high. You have to be a partner, and you have to be a long term partner with people, because we are all in this together. We have to be helping one another. Well, i would say the same thing you just said is Everyone Needs to feel a part of society and that you belong, and also what we talk about is the democratic conversation, that everyone has the right to raise their voices and make your voice heard, and a big problem facing that is this censorship and being afraid and being quieted, so i think this is something that is also a directed at the political leaders, but also on other levels certain persons. So that is a big challenge, we have to keep on going, and i think the big, fundamental thing is that Everyone Needs to feel a part of society and the community. Many good thoughts, a Cohesive Society and Inclusive Society where we feel like we are a part of building the same democracy for everyone. Critical thinking was mentioned earlier, and i think that is also vital. We do not have to agree with each other all the time. Democracy is also the right to disagree and to change government every four years if that is what the public ones. All of the things are things that we need to safeguard, because our future depends on it. As i said earlier, democracy is on the decline, and we need to fight back. We need to prove to everybody that democracy is the way forward. This is a system that actually works. It gives us freedom and gives us wealth for society, which i think is absolutely in the best interest of all. Really appreciate that. It touches on what i will ask as a last question, which is what is your personal reason for hope and they see that you have, whether in academia or Civil Society or government . What is the reason for it . This topic is a challenge, it can be really bleak, whether you are focused on the foreign influence challenge for them more social kind of detachment from facts or erosion of trust in institutions and things like that. It is designedly that sort of challenge is designed to make us a loneliness or feel disempowered. And a big part of feeling like a partner or his feeling as part of society or that we are all in this together is a feeling of agency, individual agency, and so how do we build up that as a mechanism of resilience . How do we build up that feeling of agency in individuals, and i guess the other component of that is how does one missing component from the answers is the responsibility that we have in open societies to each other and a broader whole . And so, given the framing of the nobel prize summit of truth, trust, and hope, what is your reason for hope in this space Going Forward . What is a reason for optimism and action in this space . And i will start with the magness. If we do not have hope, what do we have . And there was no other option. We need to work with this and we need to work to make it happen. Hope and optimism is a starting point i think. Mistrust, we have to put trust in all levels, and i think there is awareness and there is a willingness to do the work. So, this is not exactly a bright way of saying that i have hope, but we have all lived through three rather horrific years of this pandemic, and whereas disinformation on the various things that did not touch our lives has been around for a long time, but this was a case of disinformation that affected all of our lives, and in fact cost lives, and i think that is given us an urgency. I think the fact that we are simply having this summit is an important beginning or at one of the many beginnings to really come to grips with the bad actors that are disseminating information for whatever reason they are doing it, and that this is not something that is just a policy debate. This affects lives, and we i think, because of the drastic nature of what we have just gone through, i think i am optimistic, because i think more and more people are taking this as a call to action. And i have a lot of hope in that, the ability of people. And frankly, being part of this panel for the last three days has been astonishing to hear all of the ideas and all of the perspectives of people, so i have a lot of hope, because a lot of people are trying to solve this issue. Thank you for that. Currently, we have a lot of work to do on this topic. I always summit job when we having this session that we will not solve it all in one session or even chip away at it, so we will do another session at some point, but thank you so much for joining us. I think in terms of moving from top to action, we are about two of the workshop, so i will introduce that in a moment, but in the meantime thank you so much for all of the time that you have spent on this issue, for your work in particular, and or continue to work coming forward in the call to action. Thank you so much to the house of sweden for having this conversation as we move into the workshop. Thank you to ambassador karin olofsdotter, and if you feel like you do not have enough vitamin d, we will have a workshop and move upstairs in about one hour and 45 minutes. At this point, thank you so much, and i would like to welcome the Senior Analyst and training specialist within the Psychological Defense Agency for an Interactive Workshop as we collectively not only is up on stage but also the audience members here in person will go into an Interactive Workshop on understanding and countering information influence activities. Thank you so much. [applause] good morning, everyone. Now you can hear me. Good morning, everyone. I work at the swedish Psychological Defense Agency as a training specialist, so i coordinate a lot of horses and trainings for mainly the swedish audience but also foreign in an international audience, and i am very excited for you to be here and take part in this Interactive Workshop that we will conduct an out the coming 55 minutes. I would like you to be able to contribute to this workshop. So therefore, on some occasions during this workshop i will ask you to discuss with someone next to you, and for people that are attending online, tried to find someone to discuss with, but you can also do this by only your own thinking and making some notes on your own. You will also use your funds, and i will use menci. Com to try to see where you are in your learning, and we will visualize where you are on the screens as well. But i will tell you more on which code you can have or which qr code you can scan with your phones on the screen here. [indiscernible] i am not sure about the wifi. We have to have some Technical Assistance with the life i wifi in that case. Could we have that from our house . [indiscernible] 2900kstree. Everyone got it . Success. I will continue. When we discussed disinformation, we need to be sure of what we are defending. We need to make sure that we understand our fundamental values that we would like to defend. It can also be called our key values or core values. These have many different names, but i will give you some examples using sweden. The first is life and health of humans. It can be both physical health, it can be mental health, it can be protection from accidents, it can be protection from diseases. But it can also be including that we need to protect healthy lifestyle. It can be also to protection against violence, both Domestic Violence and violence in the society. Democracy, rule of law, and human rights are also one of the fundamental values we need to protect, and in this, trust is really a core thing when it comes to trust in democracy and trust in the democratic institutions. But we also have to trust the judicial system, and we have to trust and defend the every individuals right to live their own lives, including in human rights. In this we can also try to aim to live a life with dignity. When it comes to another fundamental value is the environment and the economy. These are put together for this presentation. We need to protect the ecosystems that we have an fundamental services at ecosystems are providing for us. It can also be the physical environment, the biodiversity of such, and when it comes to the economy it would be both vibrant property and public property that needs to be protected. Also the value of production of goods and services. Vital societal functions, and for example of this, could be Critical Infrastructure is also important to protect. It can be the emergency services, it can be the water supply, treatment plants, transportation, munication, infrastructure at large communication, infrastructure at large. National sovereignty, that is control of the territory. That is that we have control over the political decisionmaking processes, and also of the supply of needed supplies into the country. It is often seen as a prerequisite for the others, but what i would like to do now is try to see where you are at when it comes to these values, because in another country that is different from sweden or in an organized session that you would like to protect, values can be different, and therefore it is always important to discuss with your team members or within the nation what are the values that we need to protect . What do we need what are we willing to risk our lives forward to protect these values . And i would like you to be able to interact with us now with this question. Which fundamental value should be protected by the government . Prepare your phones, please. And here, you will have a couple of minutes here to go to the website and enter the code or scan this code if you are close enough to this. And i would like you not to discuss with someone that its next to you about these fundamental values. Which should be protected by the government . And you have a slider here now, so you can put points by these. But i would like you to use only 25 points. If you put maximum, it is 10 points. If you put half, it is five points. So here we can see your own possibility to contributions on seeing which values are needed to be protected. If there are any differences, if you think all of the values are the same, you can put five on all of them. If you think two are more important, you can put a maximum on two. We get the results coming in. Interesting. Interact with your neighbors as well, because learning is great when you discuss with someone else. [indiscernible chatter] [indiscernible chatter] [indiscernible chatter] ok, thank you very much. Thank you very much for your contributions. I will just make a brief note on this one. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So i see that i think democracy, rule of law and human rights is one of the values that you collectively think are one of the most important ones are protected by the government. The least should be national sovereignty, so that is a interesting. Who else should protect that unless the government or the state is doing that . It is just a basis for discussion, this one. I will not use these results and anything else. It is just good to visualize for you when you were doing this, so you begin to discuss the values. [indiscernible] i have never done it in sweden, but i will, i promise. I will continue. We will continue later on. Lets prepare another slide. Ok, now when we know a little bit more about what needs to be protected, we need to also foresee the exploiting of vulnerabilities, and it comes to use this to hurt the values that you stand for. And some of them, in this example i am using three, but the main important vulnerability is lack of trust. It is not really covered here, but i will give you that in the forehand here. Ok, in the media system we have a couple of vulnerabilities. Especially these last months, i seen that rapidly evolving technology might be a vulnerability for truth when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and being able to produce text, for instance. It can also be image generation. One example i am not sharing in this workshop are the images that have come up from the popes wedding. If you can find an article about that, please send it to me. I would like to read more about that. That is also done with Artificial Intelligence generation. Those are fake, but when you see it you immediately believe i do not really understand what i am seeing here. This is like, yeah and i will come to that sin. There are changes in Business Models when it comes from paper pushing publishing or digital publishing, you can be your own journalist. Everyone can be a journalist and have a blog and begin to write things. Citizen journalists is anything actually challenging the whole system. So some of the traditional techniques that can be used are actually enhanced by technological advances. They can be photoshop images that have been used traditionally for this. In the expectation for this can be for many various reasons. It can be for the persons own personal benefit, political gain or economic gain, or just to see if it can be done. There are many different ways how to use media system vulnerabilities. Another part of vulnerabilities are the Public Opinion vulnerabilities, and those are vulnerable to social proofing. When you begin to discuss with someone else, you can say that my experiences are something that can be valid as a truth, as a truth that you can generalize from, that is not always like that. It is not always true that your experiences are what is general for the whole society. When we interact with others, we like to discuss what we have been a part of. So, others can interpret your ideas and your experiences as being correct, even if they are not. Techniques that are used in this way can be fake accounts, fake personalities that are writing about experiences, or that you have troll armies that are giving life to fakes just to show that there are more people that feel the same and try to make you jump on the bandwagon and think the same. Especially when it comes to using an emotional language or emotional pictures. Ok, the third part, cognitive vulnerabilities. This ties into the others just a little bit. It is it is, actually when it comes to informational warfare, it is the brain that is a battle space that we are battling within. It is when you see objective facts, there can be so many objective facts that you cannot really comprehend it. Our minds cannot really take in all of the facts that appear, and we also have a lot of leaf belief, and we tend to like to see what confirms our beliefs. And what we actually see are somewhere in the middle here, somewhere between objective facts and what confirms our beliefs. But the world is bigger than that. Objective facts can be more than what confirms your beliefs. So, information flow activities can actually exploit our patents patterns through this, and also by knowledge of your behavior online, what you have done online creates traces that someone else can use to target information towards you. What you get from the algorithm when you scroll giving social media is depending on what you have seen before and what someone else has programmed the app or the webpage to show to you, and it gives those technical aspects some kind of influence over your perceptions, over your thoughts, and also in the end by your decisionmaking. Ok, one other important issue here are the difference between information influence and opinion information, and this is really a key thing when we discussed this in our trainings in sweden. It is a crucial value, because what we are taught to do is to protect the opinion information from illicit information influence, and i will give you an observation here to help you to identify false information. First thing, the information is misleading or deceiving in some part. It is intentional. It is created by someone that would like to have an effect upon you. It is disrupted disruptive, because it actually hurts our fundamental values. So all of these need to be filled in one way or another, and this is a discussion of how these are fulfilled when you begin to discuss. It is not a clearcut case in all cases. A very wellmade influence Information Campaign are using some parts of this and mixing it with truth, and that makes it more difficult to actually identify it. And i will give you now a swedish example. This could be different from some others, but we look only at wendy misleading, intentional and destructive information is documented as a target again sweden. We should not follow this information that originates within sweden. We are only following is this information that originates from a hostile act or, and we are using the definition the Swedish Security Services are using, so we are not having any other definitions in our agency rather than what the Swedish Security Services are having. Ok, opinion information is when information is transparent and verified. When you can check the sources on you can factcheck what has been done here. It is also that it strengthens democracy, even if we have different opinions, that is a part of democracy. We have to confirm that a good democracy has a lot of opinions, and can be a quite nasty debate sometimes. You can be harsh, emotional, but this is a part that we need to protect. If everyone is agreeing, that we are not really having a solid democracy. We need to be able to have these small differences or large differences in ideologies. It strengthens also a constructive debate between the opinions. It should not be a destructive debate when you are actually hurting an individual. You have to separate the argument from the individual, because then you have a good opinion information process, and we are trying to protect information and opinions that are created by swedish citizens in sweden, so that is where we are at. It can be like this. The earth is flat. That is a part of the opinion information to say that. We have two attacked a citizens right to be wrong and sometimes also the right to life even if it is bad behavior to lie, but it is not a crime. It is not a crime to live, because we are not the agency that will tell what is the truth within the society. We can only say when someone is lying and doing it intentionally from another country. That is when we can speak out. Ok, some narratives to foster distrust, and here you have a qr code and link, that i have used as a source for these narratives , because you need to put information within a Wider Perspective inside the narrative, because that gives it more strength, because thus it is creating something that concerns peoples leaves beliefs if the information is put into a bigger system where people are already thinking what the world looks like. Some narratives that disrupt can be there is an elite against the it can be about values, certain values are threatened. Often it is concerted family values that are threatened by liberal values. It can be a threaten of national identity, that a country has had but now it is under threat. The identity of a count be under threat. Itso about narratives that ciety is on an imminent collapse. This has been used by antagonists for sweden, saying that europe is about to fall. Societies are crumbling. Then we have the narrative where you are calling it a big joke, to say that is not really true, it is so uncertain, you need to see that someone is pulling a string on you. All of those narratives can be used to foster distrust when he put this information and they fit into the narrative. We will not test this on an example of a disinformation that were a directed against sweden. This is a poster on a process stand in moscow. It says in rsian, do not become toys in foreign hands. U see a picture of uncle sam pulling the stngs of pp longstocking and you have the source here as well. It might be in a different language. You might use a Translation Service to read it. It ends up in a finish website. What i would like you to try to see is, which narrative is used to foster distrust . You need to discuss a little bit. You need to know about to be longstocking. One of them are from sweden. It is like trying to pull the strings on another country, from another country, but why is this in moscow . There are some any questions. But it puts into a narrative. Could it be within one of these narratives . You will have some minutes to discus this with your neighbor. [indiscernible chatter] and you are able to vote on which narrative think it fits in. [indiscernible chatter] is anyone disagreeing . You dont have to jump on the bandwagon just because everyone else is voting this. Interesting, thank you. [indiscernible chatter] thank you very much for your contributions. Thank you. I would like to comment on this. Most of the individuals that have voted think it has to do with our narrative loss of identity. That is what i would think as well. We have the russians that might think that uncle sam are pulling the strings on sweden and finland. And deciding for us if we should join nato or not. This poster came up when sweden and finland were about to discuss a nato allocation because of the renewed invasion of ukraine. One year ago. That is why they wanted to see how this could they do something with us . This showed up in different locations. Its very difficult to understand why it ended up in those locations and what the intent was behind it. We can do to analyze this a little bit. What this was about. And what kind of values that are behind this. Then you can begin to discuss who is the target audience, what is the effect of this . We believe that behind. Now we have just practiced about using narratives. Question . Outside of Tourist Spots . Like museums, historical sites where finnish or swedish torts might have come . It was outside of a consulate inside st. Petersburg. They might show up and to see it and go, what is that . I would like to continue. We can take that decision later. Discussion ater. Capability countering activities. I would like to spend a couple of minutes discussing the capability. You have seen the information peace, what kind of narrative it is. You need to do something else. If you would like to build capability countering influence information activities. You need to be able to identify malign information and differentiate this from opinions. I showed you before, it should be misleading, intentional and disruptive for some of your fundamental values. You have to know where it is directed from. And to know your own mandates about what you are supposed to do within your organizations. This can be different in Different Countries and different organizations. Analyze. That is to understand how the techniques are using vulnerabilities within the target audience to produce an effect. You need to be able to discuss this with others. It is difficult to do an analysis on your own. The best part is, when you have done homework on your own, and discuss it with some one else, you need to have colleagues maybe shape maybe they should not be trained the way you are. You produce the best results when you do an analysis like that. You need to be able to counter the disinformation. Need to assess and be able to inform the target audiences that you would like to reach with the correct information. You can do that in many different ways. You can advocate your values, what you stand for, but you can also defend by blocking accounts or exposing the actor behind. You might not always know everything behind it. It is difficult to attribute a disInformation Campaign to a specific aggressor. You need to be careful if you choose to go that path. Report. That is about reporting within your own organization so that your colleagues become aware of what is happening. It can also be reporting within a governmental system or within an organization. It is mainly about showing to others what you have experienced. Support. Others might be affected as well. You need to be able to share that information with others. You need to support others messages if they are affected. You can prepare, and come together, like we have done in sweden, to build a defense, that everyone is defending together, both the individuals, the citizens, the local level, the governmental level, Everyone Needs to be able to support each other. That is when we have good resilience. We are not strong on our own, just strong together. The fourth degrees of response, then we go into another discussion exercise. When we train the swedish communicators on we try to show them this. The first one is to assess the situation. That is something that you build from the beginning, if you have good tools, to see what is happening. It can also be a neutral action to show that you are aware of what is happening. You can begin to discuss that you are having a way of seeing things. That might also be something to deflect or prevent the aggressor from losing you, when they know you are watching. It can be about mapping situations, act checking, fact checking, making transparent investigations. The second level. Inform. One of the first things, if you see you are a target from information influence campaign is that you inform your target audience that you are working working on it. You will get back with new information. That is the first statement that you can do. When you have more facts, describe the facts of the case. It is going on. You can correct if something is misunderstood. And you can also emphasize your values, you stand for. The third part is advocate. That is more forward leaning. You go into dialogue with your target audiences. You open up to discuss your values. You can help your target audience to argue and debate. You can show them that this information fits into a bigger narrative. You can choose to cooperate together with others and you can also package information and show that this actually tied into other events. It takes more time to advocate what is going on. Defend. It is about defending the organization and target specific actions against the aggressor. The reporting, blocking accounts, or about exposing. The most useful part in this is actually by morning the disinformation happening. Ignoring the decimation happening. Do not do anything. If you are beginning to inform, and you are repeating false information, the false information gets traction. It gets the spread that you aggressor would like to get. If you are in the same way spreading it. When i showed you the picture of uncle sam, i was spreading the disinformation. But i am trying to help you out, you are protected, you are in a safe environment, you can discuss that with someone else. And you will be able to see where it fits into different narratives. But it is a part of a campaign, a narrative of a worldview they would like to expose. I will give you an example, and then you will discuss. Last year, this happened. Outside the swedish and betsy in moscow. Embassy in moscow. The posters read, we are against nazis, they are not. It is about one of our kings of sweden. The auorf be longstocking. Ingmar bergman, the director. And we all have the founder of ikea. They are doing really troubling things. This is about when sweden was discussing about nato. This is the same time, they are using swedish colors, but also another country that they have recently invaded. The russians invaded ukraine because they wanted to denazify ukraine. Now they are saying you also might be nazis. Think of it. Ok. How to conjure counter this disinformation . Be prepared. What would you like to do in this case . Would you like to assess the effects, inform one of your target audiences, advocate your values, or defend by exposing . Please discuss. [indiscernible chatter] please look at me, and please , i will continue. Thank you. In order to prevent the spread of this disinformation, we are just monitoring it. The spread of this happened when the embassy took a picture of it, and they sent it to turn lists in sweden. You can mitigate the effects if you do your good journalistic work. Journalist or not, that is how you can get traction in the system, by not doing anything. It is a good example of showing how easy it is to do things, and how you can spread it through journalists. But you can also mitigate it with good journalists. This had nothing to do with the russian view. She is famous and well seen in russia. Especially by another character on the roof. It is using her, say took a line from her direct from her diary, and said she was more afraid of the soviet union invading sweden, rather than the nazis. They are pulling information and trying to put it together. But it is so much information, you can discuss this about what is going on, and the statements. That is that. Thank you for your contributions. Conclusions now. The four pieces of conclusions that i would like to bring with you from this. The first one is this. Build trust. Build trust among citizens, amongst institution, from the citizens towards the government, but also from the government to trust your citizens. So they can be helping out by being informed and being able to resist the information. Strategic narratives. Use your own strategic narratives, counter narratives, your own story, x lane why he would like to defend your values. What your values are. Why would you like to risk your life if there is a war coming for your country . What is worthwhile within yourselves to fight for . Why would you risk your life, still go to work, during wartime, instead of fleeing . Understand your target audiences. Whom are you trying to reach with your story . You need also to understand your adversary. What are the values, why do ye why do they attack your values . You can see where your country is mapped into different value systems. I have been using that to try to help swedish communicators to understand why are we a threat . We are in the middle of everything. We are no extremists. We are. One of the more liberal ones when it comes to values. We do not see ourselves like that. But others, more conservative cultures, might cs like that. And see that as a threat. You need to understand that the disinformation we are working with in the the swedish psychological defence agency, comes from a foreign aggressor. We are a defense agency, and they are not allowed to be used against swedish citizens. That comes from the 19th 30. Had a crisis, when the military was used against citizens, the Police Called for help. After that, the swedish military is not allowed to be used in sweden, if they can use force against civilians. They can be used to help out, but not when they are using armed force. Share best practices. Earn each other. When you have experienced something, tell it to others. Build your own networks. We base our work on research. Some of the research is here. We are updating this now with a new countering information influence account, going through the latest research. You can read the onfrom 2017 with this qr code. We used the researcho form a handbook for communicators. You can have that on the other qr code as well. It is also about to be updated. It is a couple of years old, there are things we learned, how to how this has been received by our target audiences when we train people. We have good ideas. We need to base this on research. Questions and comments on this are welcome. If you have any questions and comments, feel free to type them in here. I will remove this, but if you have any questions and comments, i will be able to read them later. On that note, you will have that in your phone. I am finished. Here we have the qr code for our agencies english webpage. You can contact us. If you need to discuss things, you can reach me. Thank you very much for your contributions. I hope you have learned something. [applause] i hope this has been useful in terms of the discussion, as well as the presentation. It is really hard to grapple with you examples. It is easy to sit on a panel and say, disinformation, we should grapple with these ideas. They are a lot harder to look at a poster and real world example, and see where the tradeoffs and balances are. And many times, none of those answers are thorough or comprehensive. They start to chip away at building resilience. As we talk about this, building into getting away from threatbased frameworks. There is nothing that is in the information environment that is something we are against. As opposed to resilience based frameworks that protect the space for information to flow. The greatest strength of open information environments. It is imperative for all of our work in building more resilience. And encouraging and protecting the debate. The ability to grapple with new discoveries, or new information that we depend on. I think you for the presentation, thank you all for joining us. Thank you for grappling with these issues at the root of trust. Thank you for the discussion. We will see you at the next version of the conversation where we are talking about this shared set of facts and shared responsibility we have for protecting open information environments. Inc. You so much. Thank you so much. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute,