Can we adjust to that new world. He served as the special master of the redistricting plan for many states and his current work examines the impact of changing technology for Political Communications and andtion administrations that is what he will be talking about here today. That, welcome nate. [applause] thank you so much. Its an honor to be here and on this panel. The table andset they will break the china. I will talk about the issues and they are going to does this is a deep dive anyway. They will dive deeply into it. Topic. S is a big the question of how the internet affects democracy. What are the unique challenges that the internet poses for democracy. , what would reforms look like . I want to start with a few caveats, which there are several always get these objections whenever i talk about democracy and the internet, which is we have all seen this before. That is the first academic disagreement. And the answer is, yes. Some of these problems we have seen before. Yes, we have seen it many times before. But the question i want to focus on and the panel is focusing on what are the unique features that are either differences in kind or such differences in degree that we really need to focus on the technology . He second academic section objection is what you think is so bad is actually pretty good. And, look, the internet is a Technology Like any other. There are going to be good things. About talk a little bit how there has been a seachange in the way we have thought about this in the last year, particularly because of the election. The third academic argument ive been published on this before. A lot of people are riding about this. Re is a whole book actually the third book on this question. I recommend it to you all. A little bit about how i got into this area. I am a campaign and voting specialist dealing with redistricting in campaign finance. When the Supreme Court issued its decision, maybe the most reveal reviled decision of court, most looked at it as this great crime the Supreme Court committed, giving corporations personal rights, right . Corporations are people, too. I look at that case and say thats really what this case is about. It is about the transforming nature of the internet for communication and that is why. That case was not about a corporate Television Ad that was washing over captive eyeballs as they were watching the super bowl. What that was about was about an on demand movie you could download from Something Like hbo on demand. It was produced by a nonprofit corporation. Citizens united. Presaged the future of communication where we will no longer be receiving linear is what i think are the six features of the internet that make it different from the previous communication. The speed of information this has become the main way we get information online. Before,anonymous speech the capacity of an anonymous speaker to reach unlike a wide audience is a very unknown. Forwe have a fancy word echo chamber, that we are self selfselecting into our own information preselected for us by the platforms and the like. The issue of sovereignty of course came up in this election, or the lack thereof which is for the first time it would seem that the United States election was in some ways penetrated by a foreign power. And then finally, the new problems created by the extreme power that corporations like facebook and google have when it comes to political communication. All right, so let me start with velocity and virality. You probably heard this quote a lot together. Attributed to mark twain. At least if you look on the internet it is attributed to him. He died in 1910. [laughter] one of many examples, but the point still remains which is that especially in the internet age, there is a capacity of lies and any communication to reach around the world and back again before it can be corrected, before it can be mediated, before it can be assessed for its ferocity. Why is it this happens . The big story in terms of the speed of communication is we can do it individually. So each one of us can be a broadcaster. Whereas previously you had the sort of elite broadcasting companies. You had the newspapers, whether the local or National Level who would act as mediators would act as certain types of mediators or at least would put in roadblocks for certain types of speech and information getting to the public. That had positive and negative consequences. When Walter Cronkite said that is just the way it is americans , believed it. There was a neutral source for information that people could count on. That excluded certain voices from the left and the right. But now what we have is a media ecosystem in which republicans are trusting certain sources. Democrats are trusting certain sources, and there is little trust in the media as an institution at all. That lack of trust is representative of a larger lack of trust americans have an in almost all elite institutions. Not just say america. It is happening around the world. This lack of intermediaries, right, this league of intermediaries that squelch speech or set the ground rules for what could be transferred from political actors to the mass public is what makes the problem of fake news possible. Everybody who talks about fake news hates the moniker of fake news. You can count me as well. Fake news is not really news. It is describing a heterogeneous set of phenomenon. On the one hand you have the daily show or the onion. Satire, which is fake news, and the first time we talked about fake news, that is what we were referring to. It also refers to things on the top here, fake news for profit. Something we did see in this election really at a scale that we had not seen before. You are probably familiar with the 115 macedonian teenagers who put up these particular articles, such as the pope endorses donald trump. Why was that . It wasnt that they had some affinity for donald trump. It was because of the way google and other Services Provide ads, they could make money lifting up putting up something that would get a lot of clicks. The fake news for profit issue and topic came up. But then beyond that relatively sort of small problem, people who are putting up websites in order to make money off of the ads, you also have, as we have heard in the most violent consequence of fake news, the pizza gate scandal where someone sort of believing the conspiracy theories that were stirred inthe stirred in the cauldron of reddit and four chan, these websites, then actually took action by going to a pizza shop and firing a gun. And so all of this is a product of the fact that you dont have the traditional intermediaries. And that it is a more populist and popular form of communication. Now if you look at the data on fake news, you find as buzz feed buzzfeed has done some incredible journalism on this, and others have shown as well remarkable amount of sharing of fake news. The Pew Research Center, and we can talk about this afterwards, 23 of americans say that they have shared a fake news story. If you look at the tweets or the engagement on facebook, you find significant sharing of fake news during the election. We do not know, however, what affect fake news had on the election. My colleague at stanford said he doesnt think it played a positive role. Have you defined fake news . You get your hands on all sides there. E sets out but, what we can say is the media system has changed. Certain incentives were there that we did not have before the internet and we have a lot of , this content on the internet. One of the reasons, the ability to engage in anonymous speech online. Now look. We have a long tradition of anonymous speech. Something we should be proud of, the federalist papers, publius, something later than that. Anonymity is sometimes protected under the constitution. It also in the internet age facilitates misinformation, the problem of foreign intervention, it aids in the propagation of hate speech. And then the issue of box. Which i was referring to before, which is computers can essentially imitate human beings. Now let me start in talking about the issue of bots. Just to be clear what a bot is, it sounds fancy, but it is essentially just code in the computer or in an algorithm in a Search Engine that produces, you know a response or or delivers communication to you. Bots can be good, bots can be bad. You can have a bot that tells you what weather it is every day, right. Its just a computer code that gives delivers information. When we talk about the kinds of bots that affect campaigns and affect elections though, we are often talking about in particular twitter, although its really interesting that there are now bots on youtube and there are bots on facebook that theyve been pretty aggressive in trying to police them. But these bots are automated accounts that pose as individuals, in a sense, or they seem like there might be individuals, who retweet content, produce content, sometimes the bots are sort of sent in to comment on other peoples posts, but it creates a false impression of popularity. So Something Like one third of the followers that donald trump had on his twitter account during the campaign were bots. And but Hillary Clinton had them as well, right, millions of bots were followers of Hillary Clinton. Interestingly enough donald trump retweeted bots by theres some debates about this 100 to 150 times during the election. But thats because you dont know who a bot is, right, to sort of the average observer. Analysts, the reason we know these sort of statistics on how how many bots are out there is because if you figure someone is tweeting, some account is tweeting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you think well maybe its not human, right. And so there are ways of trying to figure out whos a bot and whats and whats a bot and whats not. But its a significant amount of the twitter accounts, twitter says its 8 percent, some analysts say its closer to between 10 and 15 certainly. During the debates in right around the president ial debates about 15 of the election related conversation was being done by these automated accounts. About 45 of the twitter accounts in russia are bots, ok. And so its a significant issue going forward. Just as anonymity allows computers to impersonate individuals, it allows individuals to engage in unaccountable speech, like hate speech, right. There is a big debate as to whether hate speech actually has been going on, going up over the last year or so. The best analysis is done by josh tucker at nyu, and i present one of his slides here, where he finds that actually during the election, there was not an increase or a spike during the in the run up to the election, during the campaign that there wasnt a spike in hate speech. There was a rise in White Nationalist speech it seems following the election, ok. Right and a blip also in misogynist speech, right, after the election. But that part this research is still ongoing, and that theres no question that theres been a rise in hate speech directed toward journalists, many of whom are here, right now at this conference, and hate speech on basis of race and gender and and religion and the like. And that there are sort of cesspools of hate speech on the internet in places like 4chan and reddit and the like that produce something, you know, things like the pizzagate scandal. Now just as there are these cauldrons of hate speech online theyre cauldrons of , everything online, right, that there are locations where you can go to get reaffirming information that satisfies your preexisting biases. Whether its cat videos, right, or whether its White Nationalist rhetoric, whether its supporting a political candidate or the like. When people talk about the problem of hamafaly, the problem of echo chambers, most of the time what theyre talking about is how Search Engines and social media reinforce your political beliefs by feeding you information that is preselected for you, right. And there is evidence that look it is no surprise to you that websites like the drudge report and fox news tend to be more republicans that go to those sites, right. That democrats are going to be more likely to go as it shows here huffington post, New York Times, and the like, right. Interestingly and this this is from 12 my colleague Shanto Iyengar at stanford the only the two publications that fall right in the middle are real clear politics and usa today at least during the during the election. Thats because everyone is real clear politics is for the polls, right. And so and so thats why that was sort of fell at right in the middle. And so the challenge in thinking about homophily and whether the internet is reinforcing our preexisting beliefs, its not a its not enough to just say well, look, conservatives gravitate to conservative sites, liberals gravitate to more liberal sites. The question is as compared to what, right. Because we are self segregating in all of our areas of life, whether its online or offline, right. And so you are actually more likely, or at least as likely, to run into someone on social media, saying your Friendship Network on facebook, who voted for a different president ial candidate than you, than you are say if you wantedto find a republican on the streets of aspen right now, right. 24 ofnly 20 , 20 to the population here voted for donald trump, right. And that so much of ourlives right are self segregated in neighborhoods, where its reinforcing our political beliefs in the offline world that we see that the fact that we see that on the online world should not be too surprising. Nevertheless, when you start looking at hot topics of politics and the like that you do see Twitter Networks which are, were democrats are retweeting democrats, republicans are retweeting republicans, and people are of course gravitating to many of the sites that that i showed you on the first slide, all right. Now moving to the last two unique features of the internet, sovereignty or lack ofsovereignty and monopoly. I am going to just briefly talk about this because weve got some real experts on the Panel Following me talking about this. In thinking about the issue of russian penetration in the last election, which you know you just need to turn on the tv youll hear 13 about it every day all of these other features of the internet that ive talked about up til now are ones that are facilitating the ability of outofstate actors, right, to have an influence on our domestic elections. That is, i think, one of the unique features of the internet age, right. Yes, its true that the United States, and you look at what the United States did in latin america, that there are examples where we have had an effect on domestic elections. And there are examples of attempts that russians, you know, even during the soviet era may have tried to have an effect in the u. S. Domestic election. But the sophistication of the Russian Disinformation Campaign with the use of what are, you know, trolls, bots, cyborgs, what those you know what bots are now. Trolls are actual human beings, if you have been watching homeland. They have a lot of they did a whole episode dealing with trolls or cyborgs which are sort of actual human beings who are in charge of a range of automated accounts. Through hacking and disinformation and the dissemination of propaganda and the like, through both official and unofficial channels, right. So that whether its through the Rt Television network or through the rt and sputnik web channels, or you know, websites that we saw a lot of this effort in this last election. Finally, let me talk about the issue of monopoly. So i had to get the atlantic in here, right. We have had an article that facebook is eating the internet. Not to be undone, the columbian journalism review says facebook is eating the world. Or as another publication said that google is the new mind control, and that you need to have google and facebook stop google and facebook from destroying journalism. And so there is no doubt that the power that these platforms have is different in character from the one from the power that say the three networks had. Because if you look at the affect that theyre having on the Revenue Sources for for journalists, its a its a completely different world than one where you had this sort of oligopoly of the broadcast networks and the like. Its a different kind of monopoly though, right, its a different type of power, and where theres going to a whole session here at aspen later today about whether google and facebook are too powerful. So i commend that to you. But we have this sort of bizarre situation, right, where you have this concentrated power among the platforms, and you have this fragmented media environment at the same time. So you have more information at your disposal, information and disinformation, than weve ever had before, and yet the power of any individual platform, you know, is diminished except for just a select few like google and facebook. All right. So now let me conclude with just talking about what the sources of reform are. First, you can look to government regulation, and thats whats happening in germany, right. So there is a law thats been proposed to stop its called the fake news bill, but its really not about fake news. Its about any illegal speech that that is prohibited under german law, which includes things like Holocaust Denial but also a kind of capacious definition of slander and the like. How that that will then be illegal online but more importantly that the platforms will be liable up to 50 Million Euros for any example of illegal speech that occurs on their platform that isnt taken down within 24 or 48 hours. Then there are the platform self regulations. So youve probably seen, if you have a facebook account, this new option postelection to report a story is fake. And so you the user are now empowered to then send a message to facebook that a story should be referred to Fact Checkers, if two Fact Checkers then agree that