Technology law and policy. Okay everybody, time to be seated. So our next panel as you can see, this is the only flight you will see for the whole panel because youre breaking free of powerpoint area theme of this panel is Voter Suppression and voter turnout and in particular, the roles that Network Technologies play in Voter Suppression and voter turn out from a variety of different perspectives. Another way to think of it is pulling back the curtain of it and getting into the technological underbelly of some of the things that the prior panel discuss. Once again, we have a fantastic panel of experts from multiple perspectives, backgrounds and disciplines and im not going to repeat everything thats in the program. But just briefly, to my immediate left here is Karen Bonfield who is a senior policy analyst in the Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative right here at georgetown law and our center on poverty and inequality and she comes from a Public Policy background. We have been jessica chrisman, who is a reporter with propublic whose cover these issues extensively. Monaco who is the Research Director at the Digital Intelligence lab of the institute for the future who studies box and he is coming to us with our computational linguistics background. So you may be able to tell us whether or not Tyler Johnson and leticias slide is correcting the other guy was real or a bath. And then finally, at the opposite endof the stable , at least geographically, is katie peters who is a cofounder of democracy works so shes no longer with democracy works but while in her tenure there, she was instrumental in the acquisition of the voting information project. She was named to the 30 under 30 in law and policy for her work on democratizing access to voting and voting information. We are super delighted to have all of you here and as the Previous Panel did i ask everybody to make a 10 to 12 minute opening set of remarks and then i will ask some questions and open the microphones to you. Oh jessica is going to lead us off. I feel a little underprepared now that you guys have these fancy flyers before but im going to try to do my best. What i, i come at this from a little bit of a different perspective on the left of the panel and im going to be decidedly less happy than the other three but hopefully thats welcome here. Okay, good. So you know, i want to explain first what election land is. We have some context for the position that im coming at this information from so election land is beendoing this 2016 , we are in preference to do it again in 2020 and the premise is that we try to pull data on election problems in real time and disseminate them out to hundreds of media organizations choose to partner with every year so in 2016 and 2018 had more than 100 local partners across the country who we were receiving information to prior to election land, the way that the media covered problems at the polls, especially on election day but even during early voting was that they would sort of drive around to polling places and the like is anything wrong and coworkers would be no they would be all right, and drive and now we have information, we get Realtime Data from a couple of other networks that do similar call ins. And they give us realtime information for those calls so we can see where the problems are and we can send journalists there in real time so that the idea is if life is shined upon places where there are problems, maybe they will be fixed before the end of voting rather than the next day saying oh, this polling place flew up 25 people didnt get the vote, we can fix it in realtime and the way we can do that is by training a lot of journalists on Election Administration and so i know that all of you in this room have been actively involved with elections there are things at present as problem but in fact are not problems. Machine break, thats normal. That is not preventing a lot of people from voting theres no point in reporting on a poll worker will make a mistake, thats normal. Lines will be 30 minutes long, thats normal. So a lot of what we see our job is is to cooling down the hysterics. Because we believe that if we show that there are problems where there are not actually problems, make normal election situations bigger problems than there are, people are less likely to turn out to the polls. We dont see ourselves as responsible for inflating unnecessary problems but we do want to call attention to real problems and make sure those are real before we send local media to cover them so that they will we see for ourselves and the reason we see ourselves as those participants is because we believe and i personally believe that the media is not just an observer of elections, we are an active participant in. So we have to accept that role and work within it. And because if you think about it, people who are looking for information on their polling place, people looking for information on the positions of their candidates, looking for information on Voter Registration, deadlines, they are very frequently not looking at their county registrars website they dont even know who their county registrar is that they are going to their local news organizations website so it is in our interest to make sure that we can have local media be reporting the most Accurate Information possible so to that end, we deeply encourage our partners to do things like go visit the county register a month before elections, play with the Voting Machines they know how they work the Voting Machines meltdown they can authoritatively say what the problem is or maybe theres not a problem, maybe the problem is the machines are old and the screens are miscalibrated so we want to cool down the situation so not everyone is in hysterics on election day and we can make sure we are not unintentionally writing this information through our own reporting and so i think that knowing what to cover and what to give attention to has been focused really come out on the candidates complaining that this candidate got more coverage than i did. You people are the gatekeepers of news and youre getting donald trump free advertising but youre not getting any in that way you participate in democracy, thats true but its also true that we over inflate one problem dont get to another poorly over inflate one problem dont give attention to all the ways things have improved, things turn out or dont and i think the trust in the yacht here is a really important thing and i know the previous speaker touched on this event. Were seeing that right now. 80 has declined to call the iowa caucus race, burning voters not very happy about that despite the 80 believing a very responsible choice and being a pollster finalist in 2000 for doing the exactsame thing. No when we make calls like this, its up to the public to decide how to interpret those things and all he can do is make sure were making the most responsible choice and from our perspective, from an elected demonstration standpoint need to do a better job of educating journalists on how elections actually work and how they function in order to make sure that their reporting Accurate Information thats what we tried to do. I think that just a , i think that its if the media can take a stronger in actively coming part of Election Administration, that everyone will be better served to have better information before and on election day which will and i think helped turn out. There are studies that show the more coverage you give these issues in local you better turnout is. My aim is nick monaco information researcher. And studying misinformation and particular bots for about five years now since 2015. Im particularly concentrating on election contexts allow the work ive done has been how to bots influence elections around the world to the topic of the Conference Today is really central to the research i do and i like to change ideas. Im director at a place called the doodle intelligence lab. We are a think tank in california but we do is we try to produce research that documents emerging ethical issues at the intersection of society and technology and a lot of work we have been done has been documented in trolling and harassment information. Today im excited to talk about some research that i havent had the chance to talk about before being in the disinformation world especially the research right now. I think some of us are acutely aware that theres a problem of disinformation such as today. I thought about so many things by this point that sometimes i forget some of the more interesting things ive done. This is a good place think about the Key Takeaways from interesting elections ive studied in the past. With that in mind my attention today is to cover case studies. One of bots increasing voter turnout and one of lots decreasing voter turnout. I could be circus that and say an tempting to decrease the cost is a big gap in research as many of you know. And then id like to talk about a case of bots which i dont think its a lot of coverage which im sure you are probably familiar with the idea of bots and amplifying messages but they can be used in a more passive way to collect intelligence or collect data on line without making noise so that something is worth pointing out. Before we dive into these case studies and ive like to just set some common definitions so we know we are talking about when we are talking about lots. I dont think this room probably needs it but just in case anyone in the audience isnt familiar. Thoughts are computer programs that post on line. There are committed programs and political bots in particular which well be talking about today are lots that are deployed to affect social manipulation opinion manipulation or social persuasion. The builders and the bots want to convince the public or a portion of the public in a certain way. So with that in mind the first case that like to talk about his macedonia or macedonia at this point and basically in september of 2018 there was a referendum of what was then macedonia on whether or not we should change their name to north macedonia. This is the first in a series that compose of something called the paps agreement which is in agreement between the macedonian government and the greek government to resolve an issue essentially the greek government had bots. Macedonia is exceeding to nato or the eu for a long time over the issue that greece had a region named macedonia as well so this is part of a proposed talk on those tensions. The first step was to have a referendum locally in the country as macedonia to consult the consistent and say its something we need to do. This was the console of the tory referendum that was not binding but it was something that ideally the government was hoping there would be a good turnout for so that theyd be acting as the will of citizens. They were hoping for at least 50 turnout at a greater amount of turnout. Its a very interesting case study. Lead research internally at the company were used to work and Intelligence Company that specializes in analyzing disinformation so i research internally on the macedonian election collecting twitter and facebook data and analyzing what was going on and there were other researchers such as the transatlantic Election Commission and the Digital Forensics lab who covered these things publicly. Whats interesting is we all saw kind of the same thing which there were 10 accounts that were hyperactive that were producing hundreds if not thousands of tweets per day that were promoting the idea why cutting this referendum. They were saying look you shouldnt participate in the democratic ross is. This referendum isnt necessary. Its not valid so there is a which is macedonian for boycott which was spread in great volume by suspicious accounts and only account so they were highly automated. My internal analyses as well as Digital ForensicsLab Documentation which you can read about came out from the investigative reporting. But essentially a bunch of bots in anonymous accounts were producing tens of thousands of tweets in the months leading up to the referendum encouraging this idea of boycotting. The referendum turnout was only 37 and not the 50 the government was hoping for. Another interesting thing to note in this case is that a lot of the traffic could be driven by macedonian citizens residing outside of the country. As well as some of the council were automated both disinformation and maybe chair information encouraging the election or produced by a macedonia digital investigation revealed. Just a quick footnote the nigerian president ial election february at 2019 and there was also a coordinated campaign in that case as well to decide boycotting the election and not showing up through the motivations in the context there was a botnet producing hundreds of them that day saying dont participate in the president ial elections. The democracy is valid and came from a criminal place called biafra state that is a separatist reading region within nigeria. Its intended to cause the nigerian civil war. In any case both of these campaigns showed behavior that was trying to encourage people not to show up for the elections. When case im excited to talk about is the case of bots that were used to try to increase voter turnout in the united kingdom. It was actually covered quite heavily so i dont think its essentially essentially how this worked was there was a group of activists who are hoping to increase voter turnout specifically among young people to vote for the labour party in the 2017 parliamentary election in the united kingdom. What they decided to do was look we want to increase voter turnout for demographic that is already defined 18 years to 25 years old. What do these people usually do . A lot of them are trying to go on dates. Why do we just build a bot on tinder to talk to people about their political views and it seems like we could vote for the labour party and if they are going to vote for the conservative party we will just tell them not to come out. This is what they did. Whats interesting about this case is the whole time it was a fairly transparent process. Activists and a team of developers that elvis bought roquefort about it. The fund raised publicly and they said this thing was going on and how it worked was if he wanted to come if you agreed with a cause you could volunteer for tinder account to be connected to the bot and to carry out what i described already. Whats insidious about this is you dont know youre talking with the bot when you are indeed this is a case of cyborg activities apart a part of the profile is automated but most of it is human. You can talk with the user in my account and i can text anything i want to texted them but when politics comes up the bot would take over and starts spreading the message to the labour party. Its pretty insidious and its interesting because one thing id like to note about this case is its positive pressure coverage. The bbc and the guardian and a lot of people wrote about this lot could look at this great thing by the labor activists and indeed i should notice well for demographic of people they were targeting 18 to 25yearold shared the highest turnout in 25 years. But something thats interesting to note here is this could easily have uncovered is a nefarious tech tech promoting another party and i think thats something that the researcher wants you to highlight and something we have advocated for the Digital Intelligence lab. The past five years have been thinking about these problems is the idea we should regulate uses of the tools and not the tools themselves. We have to have a nonpartisan enforcement of how. We cant appraise it in one case and save political yet targeting people with data is good and when it happens its not okay. Im running short on time. I might not talk about the taiwan case of collecting data using Data Collected from bots to target voters. Ill just mention there is such a thing as crawlers or spiders which are lots that can collect data on the certain individual or a number of individuals in that data informs manual messaging or auto messaging to increase voter turnout. In conclusion we have seen many cases of bots used to increase and decrease voter turnout and these bots were not transparent. They were posing as humans end up is not evidence of people interacting with the noncommitted agent. We can expect this to increase very think we can expect it to be part of a toolkit of digital campaigning until we have regulation kind of drawing a line between whats traditional campaigning on one end and social manipulation and exploitation on the other. Its a lofty goal but i think that is central to all these problems not only within politics but advertising and surveillance capitalism industry at large and i will close with that. Thank you. Thank you. [applause] and my audible . I got asked to come and talk about the ways that Network Technologies can support voters and to improve voter turnout in actually its a fun one to try to tie in because in my work with some of the large social Media Companies and her work with nonprofit organizations and work with tech and Community Partners outcome c3 major roles that id like to talk about briefly today. One of them is an invitation to lamy research turnout theres one segment of the population that by and large feels like a policy is not for them. We talk about apathy when when we are researching it comes to a sense that it is excluding. Its not feeling like they know how to begin engaging and they dont have the path. Ive seen a number of ways it creates onramps and i will talk reflate about that. The second is information. This is what jeff talked about with electionland and its a great example of where identifying good Information Sources and broadcasting them is really possible. Professor bodie on the first panel talked about the map and the information is settle