Director of internet ethics, alex damas, the director of the stanford internet observatory and the director of journalism and media ethics at Markkula Center. This evening is copresented with the Markkula Center for applied ethics. Dss event is part of kqu series on common ground. It is an initiative ream people together for civil discourse, featuring journalists hosting provocative conversations about politics, policy, art, culture, science and technology. Reckoning with the disagreement among us about how to face the future of economic, culture and environmental uncertainty. This series asks what are our shared responsibilities to the common good . Next in the series if you have an open calendar is this tuesday at 7 00 p. M. , at the San Francisco exploratory them we will look at how to overcome the polarization. On to tonights topic. Democracy is under attack worldwide. Populism is on the rise. Disinformations tool number one and social media is the platform of choice. What can we do about it . We can start by talking. Alex, i take it you have some show and to offer us about the topic . Russia is again attempting to influence the American Election for president. Alex that is what we read in the times. That was a briefing given to the house subcommittee on intelligence. But there are no details. We dont know what they mean by that. From my perspective, there are five different kinds of interference in a 2016 election. It is not clear if they are doing any of the same playbooks or something totally different. Rachel show us a few examples of what we remember from the 2016 election. Or perhaps many of us dont remember because we never saw it our feeds. Alex the kqed audience was not the target here. [laughter] alex a lot of the russian influence was aimed at the left and right. If you dont mind putting my slides up. The two major themes of types of disinformation or Information Operations is the term we use to make an attempt to change the information environment. It really had two big directions. The first was warfare. That is about the driving division by creating medical means that are injected into applicable discourse. In this case, these are three examples from both sides. Fake profiles and fake personas created by a private company that belongs to an oligarch in russia. The one on the left is supposed to be a prolgbt group. In this case, this is an lgbt coloring book for Bernie Sanders. Which is the kind of thing that is a funny little thing that you might post with the goal of getting people to join your group and to see your content and then most of the content had nothing to do with elections or politics. It was content like this that drew people in. That would allow them to inject messages later. Secure borders, an example from the right. A big topic of russia in 2016 was antiimmigrant sentiment. In the bottom right, this is a twitter account that pretended to be the Tennessee Republican party. It turns out, the entire time, the social media intern lived in st. Petersburg, russia, not florida. Here is some more from instagram, mostly. As you see, it comes from both sides. All of the tone is get over it. It is from a fake Instagram Account called blackstagram. The number one topic pushed by the russians in 2016 was black lives matter. A big oliveras was to try to build africanamerican support for these fake personas and then inject messages about hillary being racist. It was stolen from bernie as well as messages that might have been seen by conservatives and then seen as being really radical. I will give you guys a second to look at this before i ask you some questions. Why dont you check out this post. This is from a fake black lives matter group called blacktivist. Black panthers were dismantled by the government because they were black men and women standing up for justice and equality. This kind of work by the russians is being done not by intelligence specialists but the Internet ResearchAgency Employees were effectively millennials with english miners that could not find better jobs in russia. These people were not professionals. The language is not perfect. Now that i am a fake professor, i do a little socratic method. Who thinks that this being posted by somebody in st. Petersburg, russia is illegal . Raise your hand if you think it is . One person. You guys are right. It is not illegal for somebody out of the country to have an opinion about the black panthers even if they are lying whether lying about who they are. It is a violation of facebook terms of service to do this. Facebook terms of service do not have the force of law. Is this fake news . Raise your hand if you would call this fake news . The thing here is that theyre not making any falsifiable claims. This kind of argument of what was the reason why the United States government prosecuted the black panthers is something you might find in a freshman africanamerican studies seminar. This is an argument within the overton window of political discourse, but they were trying to amplify. Rachel remind us of the overton window. Alex im sorry. I am not a real professor, we are all fake professors. The overton window is the idea of what is the range of acceptable discourse. These are the things that are allowed in any society. In this case, american society. Within the reasonable bounds of discourse. That window can shift back and forth based on people being on the extremes. This is a real email. Does anybody want to guess who got this email . Who received it . John podesta. Yes. This is the email that john podesta received. It was telling him that somebody try to sign into his account. It was sent by the main intelligence director of the kremlin. We are talking about real intel people, they like to kill people overseas. The joke is that the person tried to break into the account from ukraine. Which is a little jru inside joke. These guys are hilarious. This is a redirector that sends him to a site googleaccounts. Net. When he got there, it was a perfect looking google login. He asked one of the i. T. People at the dnc whether this was legit or not. Apparently that guy replied it looks ok but meant to say it does not look ok. Which perhaps be the most important typo in the history of the human race. He logs into that and gives the goes. Rd, the gru they broke into the dnc using technically sophisticated work than this. When they had that information, they were not releasing fake accounts. They were not releasing fake information, the cherry picked the emails that told the story they wanted to tell. Which specifically was the story that Bernie Sanders was ripped off in the dnc primary. To do so, they powered that message through real emails. Where people were saying not nice things about Bernie Sanders. There is a history we cannot get into. That failed. They tried it again through an ,rganization called dc leaks which they were pretending was a real leak site. D. C. Leaks reached out to a bunch of journalists and said here are some documents from john podesta into the dnc. And the journalists complied. O had a reallife blog of all the most embarrassing things that john podesta did. Even the New York Times ran with the stories over and over again that the gru wanted them to run with. If you go to paragraph nine or 10, this says that it could be part of a russian information operation. It does not matter when that is your headline and that is what people are reading. Some other examples of disinformation around the world, these are two real Whatsapp Messages in india. In india people use the internet differently. Whatsapp is the most Popular Communications medium there. Something like 400,000 people have accounts in whatsapp. Whatsapp is not like facebook where you can post something that a Million People see, you can send a message to up to around 200 people. People in india a part of many groups, family groups, school groups, work groups. Messages get passed along by individuals copying and pasting messages that are injected in. The one on the left is from attacking the conservative Political Party in charge of india. Possibly supporting the congress party, they are big enemies. Basically lying about the price of what gasoline costs in other countries. The one on the right is racist propaganda about Blood Donation camp being fake. Disinformation looks different because, if you look at this, it is saying i am from a black lives matter group. When you are seeing this comingrmation, it is from your uncle, aunt or your coworker. Much more personal. Its harder to amplify, but in india you have groups working for political parties. The theory is that the group is about a Million People who have disinformationsh and they dont believe in disinformation, they just believe it is the right news. On behalf of the Political Party. They get notifications from the official group and then they copy and paste it and spent all day sending it out to the other 400 Million People. We are still seeing this russian lead activity around the world. This is the report that our team wrote. Stanford. Edu. What we found was a Disinformation Network in africa. This time aligned with wagner group. It is a company he owns that has actual paramilitary mercenaries. So, people that go into countries to kill people on behalf of autocrats. They are supporting autocrats on the ground with guns and with disinformation. In doing so, it looks like not for the Foreign Policy outcomes of russia but for the personal financial benefit. In Central Africa he has things like diamond mines and the like. He is backing two of the six people vying for control of libya, probably to get gas and oil rights in the future. 2016 ising changes from this is no longer people sitting in st. Petersburg. They were reported back to people in st. Petersburg. One of the guys doing it made a mistake and he posted a picture of his trip to moscow on his Instagram Account. Which is kind of awesome. The people doing this work in sedan are actually sitting in sedan sudan so it is hard to catch them. Their language is better, their cultural knowledge is better. It is multimedia. This is a whole newspaper that seems like a legitimate newspaper. That is mostly not about russia and not about Foreign Policy, it is just a newspaper. He also owns the Radio Station in madagascar. They are building the entire pipeline, they can manipulate the media but they also create their own media and the amplify that media online. Lets start with that. Rachel that is a little overwhelming. Yes, thank you. There are so many Different Things to parse out in alexs presentation. One of the first things that occurs to me is the question of whatsapp. There are so many people around the world who are unencrypted platforms if you will. Even though you can argue that journalists and regulators are doing a good job with the platforms on the open, they do and even less good job when the information is encrypted. If you think indias example, whatsapp, there is a particular case whatsapp is used in india but in restaurants, it is out to peoplenus in the communities. People in that community took other stuff from the restaurant and then they come and pick it up. Afterwards, the Restaurant Owner will share some video with you on whatsapp. There is an interpersonal acceptance of liberal privacy , in the sense that, i dont mind you sharing something with me even though i dont really know you other than the transactional relationship with the service. In the u. S. , it is a different kind of sensibility. If i get a Whatsapp Message with the video from somebody i dont even know, first of all, i may not have a whatsapp connection with people in that sense. There is a huge advantage that disinformation actors have in places like india where whatsapp is literally an interpersonal thing. As well as a transactional thing at the same time. That is one thing. One of the things it will help to understand is it existed because of the centralized paradigms of ownership in the media from print to radio. As long as media was owned by a few organizations, 10, 20, 30, depending on where you are in the world, there was a cultural sensibility and acceptance of values built in. That all broke with social media. You and i have a microphone, we can amplify our speech. There is no such thing as an acceptable window for what is acceptable in a democracy for public speech. That is what is broken. Rachel part of the question is who is responsible for the changes in the window . It was not that long ago that social media started. When it started, people were not sharing news articles. The whole idea of social media was to connect you with your friends and your family. At some point, that paradigm shifted. Part of the responsibility lies with social Media Companies that have certain affordances. They guide you to say you should be able to use this for this or that. In 2014 Mark Zuckerberg came out and said we want to be everybodys personalized newspaper. Facebook was not something people thought of as a personalized newspaper. Suddenly there is this whole encouragement, you should be sharing news stories. Suddenly, i am your aunt phyllis and i endorse this message. Across. Ow it comes some of the responsibility definitely lies with the platforms. Some of it definitely lies with us. One of the early products of the internet, people sought with the advent of blogging. I remember people saying that we are all journalists now. Turns out we are not. On social media, turns out we are loudspeakers for other peoples messages. That is a different role. We all bought into this role. We find ourselves doing it. When we talk about response responsibility, we have to talk about these different layers. I found an interesting poll that was done last month by npr, pbs newshour. They asked people who should have the main responsibility for a dressing miss disinformation. Addressing disinformation is pretty vague. Whether it is not to do it, not to respond to it, to highlight it, the numbers are these, 30 said the media have the main response about he for addressing this information. 18 pointed to technology companies. Half as many. 15 to the government and 12 of the public. 29 of democrats assigned the main responsibility to the media and 59 of republicans do. We are polarized even on who is responsible for doing something about this. Rachel as a journalist, people dont want to accept the information they receive. You say this is it, i have the answer for the question you had in the response is, no, thats not what i believe. As if it is a matter of opinion. Some people are not looking for information, theyre looking for confirmation and they are looking to signal identity and to be part of a certain group. Increasingly reading about the fact that people often know that they are quite likely sharing misinformation. They are ok with that because thats not the point. The point is not to inform people but to say this is what i believe. I think what is really interesting for the rest of us is that we have these calming common human weaknesses that make us do the same thing even if we dont intentionally mean to. What i definitely learned, my colleagues will tell you that i have to check myself all the time. If i find something that is absolutely the best illustration of what i believe, this just occurred and it totally confirms everything i believe, i just have to sit on it. More often than not, it is a set up. It is designed for people like me to respond that way and to share broadly with others in thatge, and perpetuate miscommunication, misinformation. It is often not an outright lie. It is out of context or it is made to push a certain narrative. Rachel much more like a omission. As recently as two years ago, i was among those who would laugh at politicians and regulators who were so behind the times and unable to find her left hand and right hand. Of course, it would be no position to craft laws that would be out of date as soon as the ink was dry. Now, i dont know, the whole disinformation situation online is such a dumpster fire. I dont know that there is anybody who is on top of it. Even if they did nothing but read facts all day. What is this message for what can we do from a regulatory standpoint to try and control some of this . Or is that a hopeless task . In the United States, we are extremely limited by the First Amendment. Yesterday i was in washington as i got home at 2 00 a. M. Today. Eyes arelooks like my closed, it might be. Become the big punching bag for people of both sides when they say Tech Companies need to fix things. The vast majority of things people complain about, what is called cb 230 is the First Amendment. Is that political speech has almost never any criminal or civil liability in the United States. Even if its false. The Supreme Court has said that if you lie intentionally, in most cases it is a crime. Its not a crime and it cannot be punished. Most of the stuff we are talking about is something you would never be able to adjudicate as false anyway. Even if we were a different country. The regulatory in the United States, theres not a lot of options here. Even other countries, this has mostly been about things that were already illegal speech in the country. The most effective regulation has been a 27 letter german word that i cannot pronounce. But sdg is the acronym. That is a law that requires the Tech Companies to enforce german hate speech law. But that is hate speech law and